• Less Billing Errors – When there are billing errors, there can also be a significant loss of revenue for your practice. By outsourcing your medical billing to trusted professionals, you can ensure profitability and error-free billing.
• Faster Reimbursements – When you start having less billing errors, you’ll have much more money coming in for reimbursements. Outsourcing can be a helpful way to reduce your billing errors and increase the efficiency of payments coming in.
• Fewer Headaches – Medical regulations are always changing, making it hard for providers to keep up with. Outsourcing your holistic practice’s medical billing to experts (who are always plugged into the latest regulation changes), you can avoid many headaches associated with medical billing.
• Reduced Costs – Hiring a medical biller in-house often comes with a laundry list of expenses, such as cost of training, employee benefits, medical insurance, and yearly salary costs. Outsourcing your medical billing can be a smart option to eliminate these expenses and receive the medical billing support you need.
• Guaranteed Compliance – When regulations change as frequently as they do in the healthcare industry, it’s crucial that your practice is compliant. Outsourced medical billing services can help ensure providers’ claims are clean and that they’re always up to date.
• Expert Consulting – Some outsourced billing and coding companies provide expert consulting services, ensuring providers have the answers they need to their medical billing questions.
• Happier Patients – When you have more time to focus on treating patients, you can almost guarantee increased patient satisfaction. These are the customers that can provide positive testimonials and word-of-mouth recommendations for your practice.
• Scalable Growth – By outsourcing your medical billing and coding, you have the potential to grow your practice exponentially, which is crucial for any practice looking to increase revenue, add new providers and drive in new patients.

• Specialized consulting for massage, chiropractic and acupuncture practice management
• Secure protection of private patient information
• Insurance company credentialing and claim optimization
• Expert consulting from trained CPAs, MBAs and certified coders
• Real-time verification and claim status via a secure online portal
• Practice management and performance analytics
• Accounts receivable management
• Denied claims follow-up

• Ensure You Haven’t Made Any Errors – Patients commonly encounter problems with insurers, but there are many instances in which errors occur from the provider. Identify where your weak points are (these may include denial rates, limited timing, etc.) and ensure they are eliminated quickly.

• Consider Revising Your Process – Another way to reduce patient-billing problems is to assess your current process. Ensure you have a documented billing policy that is followed regularly, and that you don’t skip verify insurance benefits, fail to communicate vital patient information, etc.—these problems may be confusing and frustrating patients.

• Evaluate Your Outsourcing Options – One of the most important things your patients need is an ally at your practice—someone who can intelligently explain expenses and address special issues as they come about. Consider outsourcing your medical billing to experienced professionals to help verify benefits, maximize revenue and lower claim denial rates.

Participating with insurance company insurance plans is not always an easy task. Between denied claims, long processing times, payment disputes and more, there is a lot that goes on in addition to insurance credentialing. But, with the help of an initiative by the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH), your credentialing can be a lot simpler and with a lot fewer headaches.

Using CAQH ProView® (formerly the Universal Provider Datasource®)—an all-in-one platform where providers can submit, store, update and access the information they need—payers can easily download participating providers’ information into their systems.

Contact a payer to request its CAQH registration kit and follow their process online, or read more to learn about simplifying insurance credentialing. If you’d like assistance with working with payers, contact an experienced medical billing company to help streamline your practice’s processes.

• Review Contracts and EOBs to See What’s Owed – Review each contract to identify exactly what payers have agreed to pay. Listing out each payer’s contracted rates by CPT code will help prove underpayments as they come up. 
• Gather Research – Once contract information is collected, you’ll then want to compile statements and reimbursement data for each payer into another document for a certain range of time (best practice is one to three months). After that time, compare the information to rates in your initial document. Major issues will be easy to identify if payers are coming up short, and if so, it’ll be important to summarize that information into a report.
• Notify the Payer – When you’ve finished compiling your information, showing that underpayments have taken place, notify the payers by requesting a meeting with the individuals who are responsible for negotiating contracts. It’s best to come prepared to share what your reimbursement expectations are, should they agree to pay for their shortcomings. If they do not agree, taking legal action may be an appropriate option at that time.
• Stay Alert – The goal of these tips is for payers to provide more accurate reimbursements. However, if the preparation above doesn’t turn out positively for your practice, it’s a good idea to perform regular payment audits to check for underpayments.