How Do Specialized Laboratory Billing Solutions Help To Eliminate Billing Errors?
In the US healthcare industry, accurate billing is a serious challenge. But unfortunately, medical billing errors are common that cause your medical claim to be denied and a delay in reimbursement that negatively impacts your practice revenue.
However, with specialized laboratory billing solutions, you can surely overcome these common billing errors.
We all know that medical billing is a complex process. Coding regulation, payer requirements, federal policies are continuously updating, modifying, eliminating, and changing. So it’s difficult for lab practitioners to stay up to date with all these changes. Especially the small practices with limited resources and time face major difficulty in efficiently managing billing processes.
Moreover, frequent errors in medical billing can negatively impact the patient-provider relationship. So the question is how to avoid medical billing errors? Are they entirely avoidable? Read ahead the ways through which specialized laboratory billing solutions help to eliminate these errors.
Three ways to Prevent Billing Errors:
To sustain business and growth, every healthy practice needs a steady flow of incoming revenue. Part of that includes making sure that there are not any billing errors that cause damage to the bottom line. Here are the top 3 tips to minimize billing errors.
1. Keep up with New trends in Billing
Due to many modifications in healthcare regulations, newfound treatments, and newly discovered illnesses, medical codes are constantly changing. That’s why it’s essential for lab practitioners to keep updated with new procedures and codes as they arise. However, advanced laboratory billing solutions help lab practitioners to keep up with medical billing and coding trends. That in return reduces coding errors, minimizes denials, maximizes collections, and improves revenue stream.
However, lab practitioners should review billing errors on a regular basis, as often as weekly, to determine if there is a pattern. Those billing errors should be discussed with medical staff so they can be corrected and not repeated in the future.
2. Make sure Insurance has been Verified
One of the major reasons to claim denial is not verifying patient insurance eligibility. Sometimes, when a patient comes in regularly, front-end staff assume that there have not been any changes to their insurance. But, if it changes and front-end staff doesn’t verify their eligibility, it might be possible that your medical practice faces severe problems.
If your practice implements laboratory billing solutions in your billing workflow that verify patient insurance eligibility at every visit, then you haven’t faced any insurance-related problems, including services not covered, services not authorized, terminated coverage, or maximum benefits reached.
3. Double-Check Patient Information
Especially when you have other responsibilities, it is easy to make common billing errors. For example;
- Submitting incorrect patient information ( i.e., name, birth date, address, policy number, ID card number, phone number, etc.)
- Submitting incorrect or wrong codes.
- Upcode or under code the claim.
- Entering ICD-10 codes with too many and few digits.
- Not entering codes at all in a given claim.
If these errors are not eliminated on time, it will result in expensive claim denials, sometimes fines, and heavy penalties. However, professional laboratory billing solutions providers double-check and verify each patient’s information before submitting a claim to the insurance company and ensure a clean claim submission process. That minimizes billing or coding errors, faster claim processing results in timely reimbursements.
Key Takeaways:
You are sure to make the most of your practice revenue in the future if you use the above-mentioned tips to eliminate billing errors. However, these tips require effort and time to do it successfully. But if you hire the services of a professional laboratory billing solutions providing company. They handle all complex procedures of billing and collect overdue and underpayments on your behalf. So you can pay more focus on providing quality care services to patients and also focus on improving other business areas to improve productivity.
If you’re in need of expert assistance, let Laboratory billings be your go-to source for an error-free lab billing solution.
Contact us today! To learn more about providing billing services.
