Are you challenged by your claims denial rate?
When a claim is denied, your medical practice suffers. While practicing medicine is all about supporting your patients, your practice needs to operate on a firm financial foundation in order to continue to serve those patients. Errors and denials hurt your cash flow and your business. Free medical billing software can minimize those errors and denials so that your practice can focus on what’s most important: helping your patients thrive.
Why Do Claims Get Denied?
When you’re working in a medical practice, you see claims that come back to you, and you wonder why they’ve been denied. Many practices do not even dispute these denials, and only 35 percent of denials get follow up. This means that your practice suffers financially due to these denials.
By tracking the reasons behind claims denials, you’ll start to see patterns. Here are the most common reasons behind claims denials:
1. Messy Writing
Some medical practices and some payers prefer handwritten claims, but these can be a huge source of errors. Your staff may not write something incorrectly, but if their writing is messy, it can be hard to read patient information or claims codes.
2. Missing Information
If your claim has missing or inaccurate patient information or poorly-documented patient encounters, this can be grounds for a claims denial. This is the responsibility of both the medical staff and the billing staff. Medical staff need to give the billing staff as much information as possible, such as information about a patient’s chronic conditions, test results, and exact details of a medical problem.
3. Inaccurate Coding
Good documentation should lead to specific coding of medical problems. If your medical billing staff do not submit the correct code or submit a code that is not specific enough, the claim may not go through.
4. Late Submission
If your claims come in after the payer’s time frame, even if the claims are perfectly correct, they can be denied because they are late. Accurate billing helps you focus on supporting your patients.
How Can Free Medical Billing Software Help?
Medical billing software can help you with the details of your claim submissions. By typing all of the information into a billing form, your claims will become less messy and more accurate. You can also set up reminders about billing, so that your practice will not submit late claims. You can prompt patients for their updated insurance information or address, so that a simple error will not lead to a claims denial.
While medical billing software can’t document your patients’ conditions, it can prompt you to use the most accurate and specific codes to document your patients’ health. Proper documentation and coding can go a long way to helping your practice reduce its claims denials rate.
While all medical practices experience claims denials, efficient practices generally have denial rates that are under 4 percent. Is your rate higher than that? Could a medical billing software help you reduce your claims denials? Visit PracticeSuite to sign up for a trial version today.
4 thoughts on “Easy Tips That Minimize Medical Billing Denials & Claim Approvals”
You mentioned that claims might be denied because the handwriting is too messy and they can\’t read the information or codes. Maybe they could avoid it by hiring a medical billing service that will make sure the information is legible.
I liked that you stressed the importance of writing on a bill. I am not great at writing things that most people can understand especially when it is a long explanation. It does seem like a good idea to have an expert write something that big up.
Medical billing can be a really complicated thing. And, it can be complicated on both sides of the bill too. I like what you said about having the correct information and coding. Every correct piece of information is one step closer to the correct billing process.
I agree that when a claim is denied your medical practice suffers. File claims in according with insurance-specific medical policies and state and federal billing regulations and guidelines.