If your in-house administrative staff is overwhelmed with the medical billing process—or if you’re a team of just one or two people doing it all—then it might be time to consider partnering with a medical billing service. You might not realize how much your revenue cycle is affected by delayed claim submissions, claims rejected for inaccuracy, or new legislation that impacts the billing process until you let a firm manage it all for you.
Upon outsourcing your medical billing and coding, your holistic practice won’t have to worry about these significant factors negatively impacting your revenue stream; instead, accurate claims and prompt payments to boost your financial bottom line will be effortless. Let’s dig into the challenges inherent to the medical billing and coding process and look at how partnering with a medical billing agency can help streamline your finances and optimize your holistic practice!
Top Challenges in Medical Billing and Coding
Medical billing and coding can be intimidating and overwhelming for small teams to handle; some of the challenges include:
Submitting Inaccurate Claims
Inaccurate claims are inevitable if your team lacks the experience to handle them! It’s also detrimental to your holistic practice’s valuable time and money. In fact, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) approximates that the average cost to resubmit a rejected or denied claim is about $25 for each instance. Following that math, if your healthcare practice has to rework 50 claims per month, then that adds up to about $1,250 per month or about $15,000 per year due simply to inaccurate claims.
Maintaining a clean claims rate indicates that your holistic practice is efficient and your revenue cycle is optimized and that’s attributable to accurate medical billing and coding! When errors are repeatedly made on the administrative side of processing claims, your financial bottom line and reputation can be negatively affected.
Delayed Payments
This challenge perfectly dovetails with the previous one regarding inaccurate claim submissions. In general, delayed payments are a huge challenge to overcome in the medical billing and coding process. If you’re constantly having to rework insurance claims, chase down accurate billing records, and follow up on patients for payment, then your revenue cycle isn’t performing as well as it should be for your holistic practice!
Delayed payments make it tough for you to have a clear understanding for how your holistic practice is performing because the current snapshot of your finances will be distorted as you wait for payment or have to rework claims from the previous month. As you might imagine, this has a significant impact on your revenue cycle; delayed money is almost as bad as no money coming in at all.
Not Keeping Up with New Legislation and Regulations
When’s the last time you had the time to read up on new government legislation and regulations pertaining to the medical billing and coding process? Are you brushed up on the numerous Medicare and Medicaid initiatives and requirements that could have an impact on your holistic practice? Odds are you’ve got to spend time attending to other matters relating to your practice, such as taking care of clients or trying to keep up with paperwork. Understandably so!
However, new regulations can pose a major challenge for holistic practices. From new rules and when they take effect, to adjusting for them, many factors during the medical billing and coding processes might influence your revenue cycle.
How to Maximize Revenue with a Medical Billing Partner
Making the decision to outsource your medical billing and coding stresses to a medical billing partner has a variety of benefits on your revenue cycle, including:
Fewer Rejected Claims
When a medical billing partner takes over your medical billing and coding processes, you’ll notice an immediate drop in the number of rejected claims connected to your holistic practice. With an experienced team handling these complicated processes, your claims will include all pertinent information needed to properly handle them to the highest level of accuracy possible. Fewer rejected claims means your overall revenue cycle is instantly streamlined and you’ll be increasing the earning potential of your holistic practice.
Minimizing the number of rejected claims also saves your holistic practice time, money, and headache since you won’t have to worry about following up on errors or have to rework multiple claims. Between incorrect patient information, authorization errors, duplicate billing, and more, billing errors can be a costly expense. Outsourcing medical billing can help ensure your holistic practice is efficient, and that the medical billing process is up-to-date and free of human error.
Prompt Claims Submission Means You Get Paid Faster
Gone are the days of letting claims pile up on your desk, collecting dust for days or weeks before action is taken. The medical billing and coding process is intimidating and can take a lot of energy to complete, which further stretches the resources at your holistic practice! However, claims that sit around for extended periods of time equates to leaving money on the table—literally and figuratively.
Partnering with a medical billing agency means your claims will be promptly submitted and with great accuracy. This means your holistic practice will get paid swiftly and you can stay on top of your finances with a more accurate, real-time understanding of how your holistic practice is performing.
Infinitely Up to Date on the Latest Regulations
When you partner with a medical billing agency, you gain a valuable resource: staying up to date on government regulations that might impact your holistic practice. Now you won’t have to worry about constantly checking on the latest legislative initiatives because you’ll have a partner who’s already doing that on your behalf.
This saves you time and prevents the headache that often comes along with reading bureaucratic documents; even more importantly, it keeps your holistic practice in compliance with government regulations. Falling out of compliance or being unaware of important changes to medical billing and coding policies can negatively impact your holistic practice, but partnering with a medical billing firm can streamline this aspect of your revenue cycle.
Boost Your Revenue with Holistic Billing Services!
With decades of experience dealing with a broad range of medical billing issues for all kinds of holistic practices, the team at HBS has seen just about every kind of medical billing error an organization can make. That’s why our clients trust us to help them manage their insurance claims to ensure they’ll be accepted as clean claims on the first attempt, avoiding lengthy back and forth negotiations with the insurance company. And best of all, you’ll avoid the scrutiny of federal and state auditors.
Contact us today to learn about Holistic Billing Services medical insurance billing services and find out how we can help you maximize your revenue!