Are you a small practice struggling with medical billing? As a healthcare provider, it can be pretty challenging to juggle patient care and billing, especially with limited staff. But the good news is that you can always partner with a medical billing company to improve your practice’s cash flow.
Instead of spending hours preparing, processing, and following up on claims, a billing company can handle it for you. This way, you can free up your staff to focus on other important tasks in your healthcare business.
But the question is, where do you start? If you’re new to medical billing services, below are the tasks you can outsource.
8 Medical Billing Services for Small Practices
Did you know that medical billing services can help grow your small practice? Instead of spending valuable hours on processing and chasing payments, professionals can do it for you. The time and resources you save can be used for the expansion of your healthcare facility.
For that to happen, you need the following services as part of your revenue cycle management:
1. Chart Reconciliation
The first step to preparing a claim is reviewing and cross-checking your patient’s records. This way, you’ll ensure that the claim you’ll submit has the correct codes, patient information, and supporting documents. If you don’t have a staff for coding, you can tap the help of medical coding services to guarantee its accuracy.
In some cases, a few charts might be missing or the payor is asking for specific documentation. This is where chart reconciliation comes in. This is part of medical billing services where a company like Med Financial Solutions works closely with your healthcare staff to settle any necessary records.
By doing this, your claims will be less likely to get denied or rejected. It will also prevent reimbursement delays, not to mention that it will be one less problem for your staff to think about.
2. Insurance Eligibility Verification
Once all your patient’s records and documents are complete, the next step is to check the insurance eligibility of your patient. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend time filing a claim only to find out that the services you provided aren’t covered by your patient’s policy.
However, you should know that insurance eligibility verification can be a time-consuming process. And if you’re within small practice management, doing it in-house may not be a practice decision.
Instead, you can outsource this to a medical billing company together with the other steps necessary in submitting your claims. Aside from saving precious time, you’ll also guarantee the accuracy of the verification process.
3. Charge Entry
After your patient’s insurance coverage is verified, the next step is to record all the necessary patient data. This includes patient names, demographics, diagnosis codes, procedure codes, eligibility, health history, and more. All these need to be entered into your electronic health records (EHR) systems accurately.
Usually, small practices find it challenging to maintain accurate charge entry due to limited staffing and resources. And as they continue to provide services, patient data keep piling up, which makes it harder for their clinical staff to keep up. Worse, charge entry errors can easily happen.
Instead of facing this situation, you can outsource the task to a professional medical billing company. Through them, you’ll get a dedicated team who will handle charge entry among other responsibilities in your billing cycle.
4. Claims Processing and Submission
Many small practices struggle in processing and submitting their claims. Aside from being time-sensitive, this task is complex, especially for patients with multiple diagnoses. Insurance regulations add up to the challenge.
From preparing all the necessary paperwork to final claim scrubbing, a professional billing company can do it for you. They can make your medical claims submission a breeze, so you can focus on providing better patient care.
A billing company uses medical billing software for fast, error-free, and efficient claims submission. This speeds up the process compared to sending all the documents via traditional mail.
Take note that efficient and accurate claims filing is crucial if you want a steady cash flow. It reduces the risk of denials and payment delays, which are the biggest enemies of small practices like yours.
5. Patient Statements
Once claims are filed, the next step for your practice is to issue patient billing statements. Just like any task on your billing cycle, this can also stretch your staff thin with other administrative duties.
Instead, a medical billing company can generate and send patient statements on your behalf. They can do this through text messaging, email, or snail mail. Through this, your patients will know the financial obligations they still need to settle.
This way, you won’t be leaving money on the table by forgetting to send statements to every patient.
6. Denial Management and Follow-Up
In some cases, insurance companies may deny claims, which will delay your healthcare reimbursement. This can be due to inaccurate information, insufficient documents, lack of coverage, and so on. Whatever it is, managing claim denials is surely a frustrating task.
With the help of billing specialists, you don’t have to worry about doing follow-ups or appealing denied claims. They can take over this task and ensure that you’ll get reimbursements as fast as possible.
With this expert handling, you’ll prevent potential losses on your small practice. It will also let you save a ton of time and resources.
7. Payment Posting
After the billing company has collected your reimbursements from your claims, they will post it on your system in real-time. This way, you can easily handle accounts receivable management by seeing your actual revenue and pending invoices.
Take note that this payment posting is not just about sending the money to your bank account. The billing company also needs to reconcile the reimbursement with your claims. This way, they can assure that your practice is getting paid properly.
8. Medical Billing Reporting
As a small practice, it’s crucial to keep track of every dollar that comes in and out of your business. This is why you should consider signing up for medical billing report services.
With billing reports, you’ll get to track your collections, identify payment trends, and see which payors are lagging. Most comprehensive billing reports also include AR aging analysis, average reimbursements per visit, and so on. From there, you can make informed decisions for your practice.
For small practices like yours, billing reporting is a very powerful tool for growing a business. With Med Financial Solutions, you’ll get custom reports on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.
Bonus: Bookkeeping and factoring services
To make it easier for your small practice to manage your finances, you should also consider hiring medical bookkeeping services. This way, your staff won’t be overwhelmed with excessive paperwork needed when filing claims. Also, it will ensure that your patient’s records would be error-free and well-organized.
Tired of slow-paying insurance companies? If your small practice is suffering from waiting 30 to 90 days for payments, you can also explore medical receivable factoring.
With this setup, you can sell your eligible invoices to us and we will advance up to 97% of its total value. From there, we will take over the collections process. For you, that means instant funds, zero administrative burdens, and guaranteed cash flow!
Why your small practice needs medical billing services
Still undecided if your small practice should try medical billing services? In that case, the following benefits may help convince you:
- Get expert help. Instead of maintaining an in-house billing team, you can outsource it to experienced professionals. This way, your small practice gets the best approach to medical billing that big healthcare facilities also enjoy. Also, it will save you and your staff from the complexity of the billing process.
- Ensure accurate claims every time. Inaccurate claims can lead to denials, which will delay your much-needed payments. Instead of letting this happen, you can outsource your billing tasks to professionals.
- Reduce your administrative burden. With the help of a billing company, you can free up your staff from the burden of dealing with patient records, claims submission, denial management, and so on. This way, they can focus on other important matters in your facility.
- Minimize claim denials. Many small practices we’ve worked with suffer from high denial rates. It’s often due to poor claims processing since their staff are also handling other responsibilities. But if you outsource it to us, you’ll reduce denials and ensure steady cash flow for your practice.
- Improved billing accuracy. Errors can easily happen when you leave your billing to inexperienced hands. In the long run, this will cost your small practice more compared to hiring a billing company. Aside from accurate billing, billing companies like Med Financial will also help you pass audits and avoid legal issues.
- Compliance with industry regulations. It’s important that your billing process observes HIPAA compliance at all times. Also, you should adhere to ICD-10 guidelines among other regulations. With a medical billing company working for you, your staff won’t have to worry about all these.
Streamline your cash flow with outsourced medical billing
Do you want to save time, money, and energy from the frustrating medical billing process? If yes, then our medical billing services for small practices can help.
At Med Financial Solutions, we offer an end-to-end approach to your medical billing. Our team will handle everything, so you can focus on what you do best: excellent patient care.
If you’re ready to level up your practice, call us, and we’ll discuss how we can help!
