Maintaining Financial Health of Your Family Practice

1. Visit our website: Click here Follow us: Maintaining Financial Health of Your Family Practice Rising operational costs, changed payer policies, decreasing reimbursement, and increased compliances adversely affect financial health of family practice. In addition, operational inefficiencies and waste cut even deeper into profits and income. Presence of certain amount of each factor is inherent in any family practice. In this blog we shared ways your family practice might be losing money and prevention tips can help you to maintain financial health of your practice. Efficient Family Practice Billing Medical billing and coding are backbone of revenue cycle of your family practice. Following bad billing practices might create unnecessary financial losses. Bad billing is caused more often by incompetence of your in-house staff. For example, front desk staff may fail to verify and document patient demographics and insurance details. Due to this, claims may be sent late or to the wrong payer and patients may walk out without billed properly. You have Bad to familiarize yourself with proper billing practices and need to enforce them in your practice. Basic billing activities like confirming insurance coverage, processing new claims and following up on past-due accounts has to be done as per quality standards. At the end of week, review Copyright © Medical Billers and Coders. All Rights Reserved Call now 888-357-3226 (Toll Free) info@medicalbillersandcoders.com 1

2. Visit our website: Click here Follow us: reports of practice’s charges, collections, adjustments and accounts receivable for unexplained changes or trends. Accurate Coding The next most common way to maintain financial health of your family practice is code accurately. Most of family physicians fail to keep their coding knowledge up-to-date, resulting in reduced reimbursement and delayed or denied claims. Some family physicians under-code, fearing the penalties for over-coding and unbundling. Leaving coding completely to the support staff could lead lots of errors since they don’t know what actually occurred in the exam room. Medical coding guidelines, payer policies update regularly, you need an ongoing continuing education. Periodically you can have a coding audit done by experienced consultant. Frequent coding audits will suggest more accurate diagnosis, procedure codes and will also check documentation as per industry standards. Updated Fee Schedules Many family physicians think that fee schedules no longer matter in this age of discounted medicine, but even in a capitated environment, you can’t calculate a fee-for-service equivalent to evaluate a plan’s PMPM reimbursement without an accurate, up-to-date fee schedule. Some practices base their fees on a whim or on Medicare reimbursement. Others base their fees according to the results of a survey of what nearby physicians’ charge, which tends to result in localized, informal fee freezes, since the same groups just keep comparing fees with each other year after year. Fee schedules that are not based on the resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS) often result in fees that are set too high or too low. And just one under- priced service could cost your practice thousands of dollars each year. Update your fees annually on your own or with the help of a consultant. Avoid Excessive Overtime Wrong resource planning and providing excessive overtime can cost family practices thousands of dollars per year. Overtime is a fact of life for most family practices, it can and should be tightly controlled. At time-and-a-half pay, every hour of overtime could have been replaced by 1.5 hours of work at regular pay by another person or by an alternate schedule. Often, staff will work overtime unnecessarily, such as when reliable staff members all stay late while the last patient is seen. Adjust staff schedules to minimize overtime, such as with the use Copyright © Medical Billers and Coders. All Rights Reserved Call now 888-357-3226 (Toll Free) info@medicalbillersandcoders.com 2

3. Visit our website: Click here Follow us: of split shifts or 10-hour days. You can have only one staff person stay to assist in exiting the last patient. Always insist on pre-approving all overtime and always stick to staffing budget. Outsourcing your medical billing and coding activities a medical billing company could be great way to maintain financial health of your family practice. MedicalBillersandCoders offer experienced medical coders and billers who will handle complete revenue cycle activities for your practice. Periodic reporting will give you an exact idea about financial health of your practice. With all billing worries removed you can focus on patient care. To know more about family practice medical billing and at info@medicalbillersandcoders.com/ 888-357-3226. coding services, contact us Copyright © Medical Billers and Coders. All Rights Reserved Call now 888-357-3226 (Toll Free) info@medicalbillersandcoders.com 3