Over the past decade, we have seen many changes in how medical care is delivered and consequently billed and reimbursed. One of the results is the greater financial burden placed upon patients themselves for charges not paid by insurers. This in turn has led to more delinquencies by patients and families for money owed for health care. In fact, a recent report showed that from 2009 to 2015, patient liability has jumped from $250 billion to almost $410 billion – and increase of nearly 70 percent in that relatively short time period!
While most providers are sympathetic to their patients’ situations, your practice still needs to pay its bills and stay in business for the good of your patients and employees.
Coming up with better ways to help your patients pay their co-pays, deductibles and other owed amounts is therefore not only good for business, but builds trust by letting your patients know that your share their concerns about keeping their healthcare affordable.
If you’ve wished that there were a better way to take charge of the whole process and streamline your back office’s collection efforts with the goal of improving patient collections, M-Scribe has developed the new Patient Statement Processing program to move your collections process into the 21st Century and enable you to take your practice’s RCM to the next level. Let’s start with a few basics, including your choice of the right billing and practice management service:
Specialty-Specific Experience Medical Billing Service Provider
Are you losing money by not using the latest billing software or regulation updates?
Compared to in-house claims processing costs, outsourcing your claims management needs to an experienced practice management service can increase collectables by as much as 10 – 12 percent.
Remember that coding itself is more complex than ever, what with the recent changes in CPT and ICD codes, and it may be a challenge for smaller practices or those with very specific billing and coding requirements to keep up with the latest changes and still train and update their own back-office staff.
Some advantages of specialty specific coding and related services include improved transparency once the claim has been verified and filed electronically (most within 24 hours), with less time wasted dealing with denials from using incorrect codes, and faster, more complete reimbursement.
M-Scribe’s successful track record with so many different specialties consisting of over 1,800 physicians since our founding in 2002 speaks for itself. Our trained dedicated account managers and other experts can help providers increase revenue immediately by meeting with physicians regularly for a better understanding of specialty-specific codes which in turn enable our billers and coders to more accurately process claims.
Experience WIth Wide variety of Practice Management Software
Failure of payer versus provider software programs to interact and “talk to” each other often results in payable claims being either mistakenly rejected or lost. Co-payments, coinsurance and deductible information may not be verified, causing you and your patients much inconvenience and aggravation. This is especially true if they turn out to have high deductibles or copays (which you need to collect from them up front at each visit whenever possible.)
Your billing and RCM service should also be able to work with all software and interface with the most-utilized platforms. At M-Scribe, we take pride in our ability to fully interface with comapnies such as Azalea Health, Imagine, Kareo, Medisoft, Cemer Health, HealthNautica, eMDs, EMA Dermatology, Carecloud, Athena Health, Allscripts, Practice Fusion, NextGen, Office Ally, Open Practice Solution, Greenway, OmniMD, Medisys, Mysis, Practice Partner, RxNT, SequelMD, Zimed, eClinicalWorks and numerous other companies, software and systems.
Offer Your Patients More Payment Options to “Ease the Squeeze”
Giving patients the chance to use their charge cards (see our Patient Statement Process described below) as well as spread payments out through a monthly payment plan can help maintain a stable flow of revenue for the practice as well as let your patients pay without impeding their ability to handle their other expenses.
This is why it’s important for your front office to go beyond simply verifying insurance but to fully understand each patient’s insurance status and communicate the need for upfront payments of applicable copays and other expenses so there are no unpleasant surprises, especially if there has been an increase in costs since their last visit. Better yet, if your office is notified by an insurer of an across-the-board increase, it’s a good idea (and appreciated by patients) to contact their covered patients and let them know ahead of an appointment.
Using Latest Methods for Patient Statement Processing
When you take advantage of our Patient Statement service with its user-friendly Patient Portal you to give your patients more secure payment options, including:
- Pay online
- Use mobile payments
- Pay by phone
- Electronic statement confirmation, with electronic files accepted 24/7
Of course, patient can also mail in payments if preferred. Paper statements are processed in “real-time” with addresses “scrubbed” through both Accuzip and the USPS to minimize misdirected mailings. Recipient addresses are identified and updated within the system, with both the free, money-saving eStatements as well as with mailed statements identified and managed online.
All paper statements are processed and mailed the next business day, via First Class (postage included) as well as NCOA Link Address Validation to reduce the chances of not getting to the intended recipient, and CASS Certification.
Also offered in Statement Processing are pre-sort, bar-coding, front-end address standardization and commingling, with “intelligent insertion” for sending multiple documents.
Other features include:
- Real-time enterprise reporting using data extraction for the purposes of automatic posting
- Secure audit log of user activity that is fully HIPAA-compliant
- Data is HITRUST-certified
- Confirmation of electronic statements
- Dashboard-based reports are readable 24/7 from any computer
- The ability add or delete notes to individual or batched documents, such as “we’ve moved”
Contact your dedicated medical billing specialist at 770-666-0470 or email to get started today.
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