There’s little question that health insurers do little to help your medical practice collect the reimbursement you’re due. Not only that, ongoing changes in federal laws make improving your collections levels even more difficult.
As a result, physician practices need all the help they can get in shortening the days claims spend in Accounts Receivable, including the seemingly obvious challenge of collecting payment in full from payers, which don’t even honor rates set forth in reimbursement contracts in some cases.
Given these challenges, medical groups need all the help they can get in improving A/R. Here are some tips from medicalbillersandcoders.com:
- Find claims which might be rejected ahead of time before submitting them to payers. Claims not paid when first submitted are far less likely to ever get paid.
- Identify such claims using software that can track and respond to rules and regulation changes by payers. This software should also take into account the rate of denials by a given payer for all doctors.
- Use software (such as practice management tools) to track all payments, and make sure that your practice is paid based on the terms the payer has agreed upon. Insurers pay less than promised for roughly 10% of claims.
- Create a detailed system to address the aging of receivables, then track those claims by payer, as various payers might have different payment schedules and different procedures for addressing late reimbursement.
- Make sure you follow up on unpaid claims as quickly as possible, as the sooner your practice follows up with health insurers the more likely you’ll get paid, and the less likely the claim will end up lost or ignored.
- Using electronic tools, see to it that your A/R workflow is efficient, or your group may endure errors in documentation which slow down reimbursement. Practice management software can be helpful in addressing this problem.
Practices with a large budget may be able to invest in sophisticated, expensive tools which can perform in-depth claims analysis. This can help such practices improve time in A/R for claims.
However, if your practice is smaller and its budget can’t absorb high-end analytical tools, you can still improve your collections by being thorough and having a good workflow in place.
Also, it’s smart to make sure everyone on your staff is aware of your A/R goals. Even if they don’t have direct contact with collections or A/R, they can be the eyes and ears which help the process along.
