If you work within the healthcare industry, you already know that proper physical therapy billing and coding is vital to the success of your practice or facility, but what you might not realize is the importance of physical therapy billing analysis tools. While it’s one thing to ensure that patients are being properly billed for procedures and visits, it’s another thing to ensure that your team is keeping up with billing trends in order to stay profitable. Everything from rejections and denials to on-time payments needs to be tracked in order to see exactly where your practice or healthcare facility is succeeding and where more attention needs to be paid.
How to Track Billing and Coding Data
One of the best ways to track billing and coding data is to compile visual charts based off of monthly data. You could try to use a smaller increment of time, but doing so may not give you a large enough picture to pinpoint problem areas. If you do choose to compile weekly or bi-weekly data, you’ll still want to create a monthly report that is based off of such information.
After tracking your data, the next step in improving cash flow is to analyze it and make corrections where issues exist.
This can be done manually, but in doing so, you’ll likely waste valuable time and resources. Instead, physical therapy billing software solutions that include tracking abilities can be implemented in order to simplify the process. Such software these days is often cloud-based, offering greater freedom and flexibility for healthcare professionals who need to keep up with vital coding and billing information in the office and on the go.
How to Analyze Billing and Coding Data
Once you’ve received your coding and billing data, look for trends. Are certain patients or groups of patients typically late to pay? Are certain insurance companies denying or delaying payment for specific visits or procedures? Are you noticing that a particular treatment is being incorrectly coded more than others? Analyzing your data by asking such questions will give you insight into what specifically needs to be changed in your practice in order to reduce or eliminate billing and coding issues.
This knowledge makes it easier to determine and make necessary changes, allowing your practice to get paid faster and more accurately, thereby improving cash flow. Catching issues early on can be the difference between a long-term costly mistake and building onto your practice or healthcare facility into the future.
Contact PracticeSuite to Obtain the Tools Your Practice Needs
If you aren’t currently using software to manage, track, and analyze your physical therapy billing and coding, or if your current billing software does not provide for data tracking and analysis PracticeSuite is available to help. PracticeSuite provides advanced, cloud-based software solutions that allow medical professionals to use advanced metrics that can highlight problem areas in billing, coding, rejections, payments, and more.
Because PracticeSuite solutions are hosted in the cloud, you’ll never have to worry about installing, maintaining, or upgrading software, and you’ll be able to access your data from a secure off-site server 24 hours a day from a desktop, laptop, tablet PC, smartphone, or other Internet-connected device. Contact PracticeSuite to find out how medical billing software can help your practice or healthcare facility get ahead.
Andrew Rusnak is an author who writes on topics that include healthcare management and medical billing.
