Is Your Medical Billing Service Going an Extra Mile for You?

If your in-house biller or medical billing service isn’t giving you all the help you need to make sure your collections percentage is as high as possible, then you may want to rethink your current billing service. What should you expect? Here are a few areas you would like to focus to choose your new billing service provider:

• Collect All Patient Info – Make sure your next medical billing service provider collects all the information need for collections, including address, phones, emails, workplace, etc. They should also want to get a Social Security number (SSN), which you will need if the account has to be sent to a collections agency later on.

• Verify Address – Does your medical billing service provider alert your staff to the need to verify address at the time of appointment? M-Scribe medical billing service includes an “alert” button that can be used to remind staff to verify addresses when the appointment is scheduled and/or when the patient arrives at the office.

• Verify Insurance Eligibility – Get the card and verify eligibility at every visit to reduce claim denials and resubmissions… and to expend less labor than collections will require. Also, automated verification, included in M-Scribe medical billing service can save up to $2.95 per verification, or more than $35,000 annually!

• Remind about Co-Pays – When scheduling appointments, your medical billing service should flag your staff to remind patients about their co-pay and why it’s important. Also, your billing service provider should make it easy for your staff to answer any co-pay questions that patients may have. M-Scribe medical billing service allows you to store eligibility verification, including co-pay information, in the patient record. That makes it easy for your staff to see with a few clicks what the patient is expected to pay.

• Collect Up Front – It’s more important than ever to collect patients’ co-pays and deductibles up front. And again, M-Scribe’s alert button can be used to remind staff about co-pays, deductibles, and any past-due amounts.

• Send Clear, Easily Understandable Patient Statements – One reason patients don’t pay is that often they don’t understand from their statements what they are responsible for. Make sure your medical billing service provider not only take care of patient statementes side of it but also it make sure statements are very clear, easily understandable patient statements that reduce the number of phone calls to your office and make it easy for patients to pay the correct amount on time.