Medical billing errors affect your patients as well as your practice. Mistakes can result in claim denials, which creates more work for you and your staff and can even lead to a loss of reimbursement. Reducing these errors is crucial to your organization’s success. Here are 4 ways that you can reduce medical billing errors.
1. Verify Insurance Information
Whenever a new or returning patient comes to your medical practice, verify their insurance information. This verification means looking at information such as:
Coverage periods
Effective dates
Deductibles
Copayments
Exclusions for preexisting conditions
For that matter, it’s helpful to confirm that your practice is in the insurance provider’s approved network. Even if your patient has been seen by your practice in the past, it’s helpful to double-check as their provider’s policies may have changed, or the patient may have switched providers since their last visit.
2. Train Administrative Staff
Adopt a standardized way of recording patient information. This way, you can train your entire
staff to verify patient information, including your office and administrative teams.
Specifically, you can train your support staff to look at three pieces of data:
Verify patient name
Double-check their insurance policy number
This approach can eliminate errors that arise from mismatches in patient data or inconsistencies between diagnosis codes and the procedures that your medical staff performed. Since bill and coding procedures tend to shift with time, it may be helpful to provide a refresher training to your administrative personnel. This training ensures that your entire staff can be on the lookout for billing errors or other irregularities.
3. Stick to Deadlines
Your practice must file claims based on the insurance company’s deadlines. If you miss one of these deadlines, it can be very difficult to appeal and can lead to the loss of reimbursement. Keep a calendar that includes these time-sensitive deadlines. Empower your staff to audit unfiled claims, so you can prevent late filings that can result in medical billing errors. Above all, file your claims as soon as possible so that you aren’t denied based on timing.
4. Implement a Practice Management System
Many modern medical facilities are implementing some type of practice management system, such as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform or electronic medical records (ERM) software. These digital tools can reduce the errors that arise from manual data entry and can streamline a host of administrative processes so you and your staff can stay on top of other tasks. Automated features can even help your practice manage higher patient volumes, resulting in more revenue while keeping mistakes and errors to a minimum.
Bottom Line: Staying Focused on What Matters to Reduce Medical Billing Errors
Not every mistake is your fault, but unfortunately, it often falls on your shoulders to address medical billing errors before they become major problems. By following the tips above, you can keep these errors to a minimum, ensuring that your practice keeps its focus where it belongs: providing top-level care to each of your patients.