When you’re running a medical practice, your first concern is for your patients. However, the business side of your practice is also important. With a smooth system for payments, your staff will have more time to focus on customer service, and you’ll be able to run your practice with the confidence that you have a consistent cash flow and a billing process with few errors.
How Medical Billing Software Can Help Accelerate Billing
How do you currently bill your customers and process insurance payments? A remarkable amount of practices still rely on paper claims or a local computer billing system and are missing out on many of the benefits of medical billing software. Advanced billing software is a virtual filing system that’s easy to access. When it’s time to bill, you don’t need to dig into the files and reformat an old file for a new appointment, the system can generate bills for you very quickly, saving you time and money. It’s also possible to use cloud billing software to complete bills from different offices, reducing email chains and phone conversations.
Good Medical Billing Software Simplifies Coding
With an automated medical billing system, codes are right at your fingertips. When you choose your software, make sure that it’s up to date on the new ICD-10 coding system. The transition to this system will require several months of dual coding in both ICD-9 and ICD-10, leading to more potential for error. Not only does good billing software reduce the time your staff spend converting to the new coding system, it also helps them avoid and understand mistakes that can impact your cash flow.
Advanced Medical Billing Systems Reduce Errors
While it would be lovely if none of your staff ever made a medical billing error, the fact is that errors happen, and you need to prevent them and understand them. Errors can lead to a claim rejection, delay in payment, or even to the denial of a claim. The most common errors are something as simple as inaccurate patient information. Medical billing software not only catches missing information but it checks coding so that errors are caught before they occur. It also tracks the errors and provides status reports so you can see where errors and denials are occurring and change your office procedures to accommodate payer specific edits.
Track Your Payments
Your practice works with patients who have many different payment needs. Some pay out of pocket, while others have Medicare, insurance, or a combination of all of the above. With all of these balls in the air, it’s easy to let one drop to the ground. When an insurance claim is denied, do you always follow through to make sure that it is paid? A practice billing system can help you with this follow through. It not only lets you know what bills are sitting unpaid, but it can analyze the errors or other issues that might be behind denied claims.
State of the art medical billing software will certainly speed up your billing and collections processes. Find out with more with a trial version of Practice Suite.
