It can be challenging to determine exactly how much of your medical practice’s time is eroded by meaningless clerical tasks that could potentially be automated. Even a thorough review of daily activities may only turn up a few issues that could be addressed, while something that causes an ongoing waste of time such as keeping payer directories up to date can cost you thousands of dollars a year in lost productivity. This type of task can easily be missed in an audit because payers only require an update approximately every 90 days, and since office staff may not be performing the function on a daily basis it may fall off the radar for optimization. Fortunately, there are ways to maintain an updated presence with your payers — ensuring that you’re paid in a timely manner — while not killing office productivity with mindless updates.
Cost of Lost Productivity
The endless stream of patients can cause a feeling of busyness within your practice that can allow critical items to fall by the wayside, such as office staff taking the time to provide friendly and exceptional patient care. In today’s competitive medical environment, this added step can make the difference between losing patients and patients taking the time to initiate referrals to their friends. The increased paperwork involved in maintaining updated information with your payers can mean a loss of around 3-5 patients per week, which can be very pricey to your practice considering one lost patient per day is likely to cost your practice around $15,000 over a year’s time. Reducing the amount of paperwork that your front office staff is required to complete provides more time for optimizing the patient flow and streamlining the overall workday — all critical to greater efficiency within your practice.
Reduce Misdirected Patient Claims
When your payers have updated information about your practice, your office staff is much less likely to spend time hunting down where to go to receive payment for patient claims that have been misdirected. The medical billing business is complex and ever-changing, requiring payers to constantly look for ways to ensure that they have the most up-to-date information about practices that are being billed. This results in a 90-day cycle of updates from the majority of health care payment centers, as they have tens of thousands of individual practices to keep track of. Even a small mismatch in data can be enough to slow down payment to your practice, which can have a snowball effect on your overall revenue. Multiply this issue times hundreds of patients a year, and the additional administrative time spent tracking down payers can cause significant challenges for your office staff or accountant.
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Efficient Data Management
Fortunately, there are new options available that will provide you with an efficient way to manage data on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Keeping your physician and business information current with automatic directory verification frees up time to focus on providing quality health care to your patients. Ensuring this information is correct doesn’t stop with your provider credentialing process, and is an ongoing managed services need. When you work with organizations such as M-Scribe Medical Billing to maintain accurate information within our database, we act as an intermediary or aggregator to provide these details to payers on a regular basis — saving your office team the hassle of these updates.
Ready to learn more about the ways that M-Scribe can save you time, effort and boost efficiency within your practice with automatic directory verification? Contact us today at 770-666-0470 or email me for more information at patrick.dougherty@m-scribe.com. We look forward to seeing how we can help you serve your patients more effectively!
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