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Modern Medicine Saves Lives Every Day
How Does Poor Patient Billing Practices Hurt Your Medical Business?
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In today's medical world, sustaining a practice is only partly about giving good medical care—you also have to give good customer service. Part of your customer service process is how your office handles patient billing and coding. Unfortunately, no one teaches you any of this part of running a medical practice in med school. This is what you need to know.
Poor billing practices can impact your income.
If you don't put good billing practices in place from the outset, it can affect your income. For example, before services are rendered, your staff should make sure that the insurance is valid and find out what the co-pay will be for the patient's initial visit and subsequent visit. You cannot count on the patient to know this information—many patients are confused about their insurance basics. If you have to run any special tests, like an in-office EKG, make sure that the patient knows that the insurance bills separately for that procedure.
By making sure that your patients understand their fees, it won't come as a big shock when they get their bill, which means that you're more likely to get paid than you would be if the patient were unprepared. You can also code future visits with the correct billing markers so that you know what co-pay to collect at the time of service.
You also need to make sure that you aren't wasting time and money through simple errors that are causing rejected claims. A rejected claim isn't denied—it just won't go through the system without correcting the errors that are there. That means you won't get paid until someone goes through the billing and sorts out the problem, which is likely to be one of several issues:
- incorrect patient information, such as a misspelled name or wrong date of birth
- incorrect billing address for the provider
- incorrect policy number or the wrong name for the policyholder
- incorrect codes, conflicting codes, or missing codes
It's estimated that up to 80% of medical bills contain errors that can cause a rejection. That means that you could be paying someone in your office to do the billing twice 80% of the time, which is a huge drain on resources and profits.
Poor billing practices also affect customer satisfaction.
At least one medical provider indicates that their office finds errors in the information that they get from the insurers as much as 30% of the time. If your office experiences anything similar, that means that 30% of your patients could walk away believing that they've already paid their full co-pay or not realizing that they still owe money due to an unpaid deductible. That makes for some unhappy patients when they get their bills.
When patients don't expect a bill, they may be reluctant to pay it, ignore it, or simply not even notice it—which means that you have to put them into collections in order to get paid. That's bound to damage your relationship with patients over the long run, while an efficient, correct procedure in the first place can avoid hard feelings that arise over collection practices.
In order to avoid running into these problems, consider consulting with a medical billing service provider, such as Premium Medical Billing Inc. They often have the necessary software and skills to handle billing issues right the first time.
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