Patient billing is a necessary component of running a successful OB-GYN practice, but for physicians who would rather focus on patient care, it can feel like a distraction from their true calling.
In today’s world, practicing medicine also means understanding and applying diagnosis codes, following insurance-dictated referral protocols, and completing endless amounts of paperwork. Safe to say, it’s not what most pre-med students envision when they make the decision to pursue a career in medicine.
That’s why more and more practices are outsourcing their medical billing functions to service providers with expertise in this increasingly more complex field.
But as an OB/GYN, what should you expect from a medical billing company? We’ve put together six fundamental ways a medical billing company can and should improve the way you do business.
#1 Reduce The Technical Burden
At a minimum, an outsourced medical billing solution should alleviate the technical burden associated with the backend receivables function.
Understanding and properly applying Current Procedural Terminology and ICD-10 coding protocols are critical to running a streamlined, well-organized, medical billing back office.
These professional service providers should have a comprehensive, profound technical knowledge base for how these codes form the foundation of any medical billing pipeline. Your office staff can then focus on the administrative duties crucial to running an efficient medical practice.
#2 Provide Access To Wide-Ranging, Industry-Specific Knowledge Base
With an outsourced medical billing solution, you have peace of mind that your billing function is compliant with the most current federal and state regulations.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is an ever-changing proposition, with gradual rollouts of its requirements, including one upcoming in 2020. (And that’s not including changes resulting from executive orders.)
Compliance with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is another area of concern and is required regardless of how many or how few patients a practice serves under these plans.
Finally, a medical billing service should support your staff in answering patients’ insurance-related questions, which requires a solid understanding of the various insurance plan structures including Medicare, Medicaid, and public and private insurance options.
#3 Deliver Consistently Accurate Results
Effective medical billing requires precision and meticulous attention to detail. You should expect a commitment to accuracy and low error rates from any outsourced medical billing solution.
Even a small oversight like a misspelled patient name or failure to input the correct diagnosis code means delayed or denied claims which affects cash flow and adds to the administrative burden.
A medical billing company should remove the burden of checking and rechecking things like whether an outpatient doctor visit was appropriately coded as a level 3 or a level 4 service, or whether a routine blood capture was input correctly. With this kind of outsourced solution, incomplete forms, duplicate claim or service incidents and errors involving non-covered charges should be a thing of the past.
Improperly billed claims can cause headaches and confusion and contribute to patient attrition rates, which are compelling reasons to leave this responsibility to a company that specializes in medical coding.
#4 Deliver Increased Productivity, Profitability & Peace Of Mind
If you’re frustrated and spending more time on billing headaches and compliance worries than you are with your OB/GYN patients, outsourcing your medical billing function may be the very best investment you can make in your business (and peace of mind).
With this service, medical professionals are streamlining the billing process and boosting office productivity while simultaneously increasing profitability and spending more time doing what they do best: caring for patients.
The highly skilled, detail-oriented and intensely knowledgeable professionals at Heartland Medical Billing & Consulting have helped countless OB/GYN practitioners discover a better way to run their business. Why not call us today to find out what we can do for yours?
