Want to increase revenue growth by improving your front desk efficiency?
In today’s healthcare environment, practices need to do everything they can to optimize their revenue opportunities One way to immediately optimize your revenue is to use an EMR with the ability to complete real-time insurance eligibility verification.
Having a features such as real-time eligibility verification assists your practice by removing any immediate issues involving patient coverage. When you rely on your front desk to serve as your first line of defense for billing patients and verifying insurance, you need to be able to provide them with the best available tools to do so! Otherwise, your front desk staff has a more difficult time with the billing process which then leads to issues with revenue generation and an increased need for customer service.
Did you know that an average medical practice submits around 83 claims per day, and yet only slightly more than half of accounts receivable are collected after a month’s time? According to the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), that results in issues such as two-thirds of physician practice revenue lost due to billing leakage and 30% of claims being denied or ignored on first submission. In fact, it’s estimated that doctors in the U.S. lose up to $125 billion a year because of poor billing practices.
Whenever a patient initially makes contact with a medical practice, for instance, that should automatically trigger the start of the billing process and insurance eligibility verification.
Front office staff should immediately collect the patient’s information, including demographics and current healthcare coverage, for billing purposes. Unfortunately, whether it’s due to overworked staff or poor organization, this doesn’t always happen, which can result in rejected claims due to eligibility.
Billing trouble is just one of the many issues that can impact a medical practice’s revenue, especially when it comes to front desk staff. In 2016, the Journal of Medical Practice Management found that 96% of patient complaints are related to customer service, while only 4% correspond to quality of care. With online reviews of medical practices now commonplace, and many potential patients researching doctors beforehand, it’s worth noting a dysfunctional front office can gain a bad reputation quickly, forcing current patients to switch doctors and new ones to stay far away.
A front office staff that isn’t providing quality customer care while also slipping in its billing duties is going to have a detrimental effect on a practice. Getting staffing in order is one part of that equation, but another is adding crucial technology such as medical eligibility verification software.
Medical eligibility verification simplifies the front-office billing process by providing real-time decisions on medical eligibility and benefits, insurance verification (including Medicaid and many other types of coverage), and handling co-pay, co-insurance and deductible data. Since medical eligibility verification software allows staff to instantly check medical eligibility, it greatly reduces scenarios such as a patient’s plan expiring before an appointment or a carrier unexpectedly not covering a certain procedure.
In the case of MediTouch’s Medical Eligibility Verification, it also allows staff to easily build a patient chart from an eligibility check, which eliminates errors associated with manual entry of registration information, for instance, and ensures accuracy of patient data in the billing system. Plus, when this medical eligibility verification is implemented at the time of initial appointment scheduling, it’ll help speed-up the check-in process for patients.
Once these methods for medical eligibility verification are in place, front office staff will become free from many of the daily, headache-inducing burdens of billing. This can lead to a more efficient front office, which equals faster payments and better overall customer experiences— both of which will help positively impact a medical practice’s bottom line.
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