Physicians know medical billing software is about much more than creating a bill. Yes, it’s important to create an accurate bill that includes all aspects of the patient visit with the correct codes—so it gets paid quickly. But today’s practices need more than help selecting codes and creating bills. They need a billing system that helps them increase back-office efficiency and boost revenue.
Let’s first look at the basic features every medical billing system should have:
- Easy encounter coding that fits your practice type and specialty
- Automatic updates when regulations change
- Accessibility from any web device
- Multiple choices for patient look-up
- Secure PHI and financial information
- The ability to create facility-based UB04 bills
- The ability to receive and post electronic remittance advice
- The ability to quickly and easily create patient statements
- The ability to create customized letters to payers, work-comp, attorneys, and patients
- Claims management (at the clearinghouse level)
Now, let’s talk about what today’s sophisticated medical billing systems can do for practices of all sizes:
- Help your back-office staff by tracking and reporting on unapplied monies and monitoring and controlling write-downs
- Help patients by creating flexible payment plans that track date and amount of the last payment
- Help physicians by making it easy for them to review claims for accuracy and make suggestions for fixing denied claims
- Increase revenue by managing patient payments and collections
- Help front-office staff by letting them check eligibility from the patient appointment calendar, either manually or in batches
- Help front-office staff by letting them open patient balances and enter patient demographics and insurance information from the scheduling module
- Help coders by integrating with the EHR so they can check medical notes to achieve the most accurate possible bill
- Help managers track the revenue cycle with a claims performance dashboard and integration with a practice management system that allows high-level revenue cycle management
Clearly, today’s medical billing software is much more than a bill creator or an easy way to code an encounter. To help practices with their bottom line and productivity, it must be part of a larger system that brings together all the parts of a practice, including front-office, coding, billing, revenue cycle management, collections, and claims management.
