How To Improve Your Medical Billing in 2009
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009According to many polls, by January 31, 2009 the majority of New Year resolutions will have already been abandoned. This does not mean that it should be a day of mourning, but rather it is the time to take stock of what needs to be done to reach the goals that were set at the end of 2008. It is critical to keep in mind two of the corner stones for achieving any goal:
1. Do not view a minor failure (i.e., you just ate a quart of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream) as final defeat (i.e., Well I might as well stop trying to give up sweets); and
2. Create a series of intermediate goals between where you are and where you want to be (i.e., instead of “I will lose 50 pounds this year” focus on “I will lose 1 pound each week”).
These ideas do not only apply to personal goals, but to business goals as well. If you are trying to improve your medical collections in 2009, you should build upon these concepts. So, given these two points what is the best way to achieve a New Year’s resolution of improving your medical billing? The best place to start is with the goal of getting your claims out the door clean. This is a great starting point because it does many wonderful things:
- You can only achieve it by having a laser focus on the front end elements of medical billing. This is where the medical billing “game” is won or lost;
- The goal is easily turned into a sequence of smaller more manageable goals such as training the staff on the top 10 date entry errors by the ed of February or achieving a 3% improvement in your acceptance rate by the beginning of April;
- Individual failures (rejected claims), provide fertile learning opportunities for improving your medical billing process. As long as you look at rejected claims with an eye towards how you can stop the rejections in the future and not just with a mind set of how do I fix this individual claim.
- It lends itself to technology aids. Invest in a scrubber that will help you find coding problems before you submit the claims. Invest in insurance verification tools that will make it easier to have clean demographics. Invest in coding tools that will help improve your data entry performance.
Use the end of January as the time for a more informed New Year’s resolution for your medical practice. Today is the time for you to:
- Understand where you are starting your journey (what portion of your claims are accepted on first submission);
- Set your medical billing goals high (96% of all claims will be paid on first submission);
- Create a “goal ladder” where each rung of the ladder represents an incremental, achievable goal on the way toward your ultimate goal. For instance your may set incremental goals of improving your clean claim performance by 1 percent each month; and
- Create a plan for how you will learn from rejected claims.
This approach and focus can allow your medical billing efforts to reach new standards of excellence in 2009.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II