Spend the time to figure out your billing processes, from start to finish.

Then create metrics for quickly measuring how it’s going.

Billing Denials Must Be Watched Carefully

Medical billing is one of the most confusing and complicated processes within a medical practice. Dental office billing is also challenging, but much less-so because far fewer patients rely as heavily on insurance.

At a medical office, the billing department can make or break the business. Many outsource just to avoid the headache, but they pay a premium and can end up making less money overall since the billing company is only paid 4-8% of the revenue they collect. So if it costs the billing company substantially more than 8 dollars to bring in $100, they are far less-inclined to fight hard for that $100.

Employing your own billing staff allows a practice to go after larger volumes of smaller individual claims.

By far the most important aspect of overseeing a billing department is creating metrics. Things such as Insurance Verification Status, Average Days in Accounts Receivable, Unbilled Encounters, and Volume of Denials are often overlooked and can quickly spell disaster if not watched regularly. Once a set of ‘normal’ metrics are available for the practice, you can easily watch the reports come in weekly or monthly and compare them to the ‘normal’.

By creating and regularly comparing the metrics to ‘normal’, the owners can easily determine where things are falling short and have some clarity for reductions in revenue.

Many billing departments are used to creating reports of data, but very few make it easy for the providers to see how that data looks. By creating simple ‘Speedometers’, it’s easy for any provider of any experience level to quickly understand not only how they are doing TODAY, but how they SHOULD be doing today.