You the owner of a Medical Practice are under financial attack. Employee salaries, Malpractice Insurance, and office rent (just to name a few) all have to be paid before YOU take home a single cent. All of these things have to get paid all while insurance reimbursements are shrinking due to endless Medicare penalties and commercial deductibles are doubling year over year!

Your Busy.. We get it and the whole reason for you hiring a billing department (or billing service) you don’t have to deal with it and focus on treating your patients.  But the HARSH reality is you HAVE to be involved to some degree to make sure your Medical billing is running smoothly

Here are 5 tips to easily stay to stay invested in your Medical billing without adding a lot to your already full plate.

1. Schedule Regular Meetings with your Billing Department or outside Billing Company

You should be meeting with your billing department at least monthly to review production and progress.  Common things that should be addressed during these meetings are

1. Your Primary, Secondary, and Patient Accounts Receivable – Is the aging shrinking or increasing
2. Any problem accounts or accounts on hold. Is the billing department getting what they need from the provider or patients in order to get problem accounts resolved.
3. Review receivables by Payor – Who is paying you the best ? where are most of your patients coming from.

And More

Meeting regularly will give you the opportunity to address common issues before the snowball into MUCH MUCH bigger problems.

2. Do a monthly Audit for Missing Encounters.

With all that you have going in it may be easy to forget to bill and an encounter or FIVE. This can definitely add up over time and the insurance companies don’t give you all day to get these claims submitted.  If you are using an EMR print our your schedule for the day and have it in front of you as you do your billing.  Many EMR systems such as [Practice Fusion] can help you track missed super bills. ALSO you biller cant bill if they don’t get the billing from you

3. Submit your billing to your billing Department in a timely manner

A general rule of thumb is to try and get your billing submitted within a week of seeing a patient to ensure steady cash flow. We see too many providers behind on their billing by a month sometimes even TWO ! Remember some insurance companies only allow 90 days to submit a claim so the longer you wait the less time your billing department has to sort out any potential issues before they can submit the claim.  AGAIN they cant bill it if they don’t have it.

4. Don’t Just Request your reports READ them and UNDERSTAND them.

Chances you are receiving regular reports from your billing department and billing company and just skipping to the last page that tells you how much money you made this month and how much you are going to have to FORK over. THAT’S fine but it is important that you be able to determine your financial health from your monthly reports. Too many providers have had GLARING issues slip by right underneath their noses because they did not take the time to see the big picture.

5. Subscribe to a Medical Billing Blog or List Serve

Only you as the provider TRULY knows the amount of work that is going into seeing a patient and you may even recall many scenarios where you were doing work that you didn’t know you can get paid separately for.  Spending an hour a month keeping up with coding changes and billing updates can have a tremendous positive impact on your revenue. Check out AAPC.org or HBMA.org for billing tips and updates.