Outsourcing your Medical Billing CureMD 07:56

The reasons whether to outsource the medical billing or keep the process in house is what differentiate one practice from another. The correct answer will vary from practice to practice depending on certain number of reasons such as age of practice, practice size, number of staff etc.

1. Saves time and resources: Outsourcing medical billing saves you time that you can use to spend with your patients. The practice staff can focus on the patient care while the medical billers will focus on your patient billing. Doing so saves time, money and resources that can instead be used to further hire, train and supervise your billing staff, outsourcing allows to make better use of your staff around the office allowing them to spend more time on patient care. 

2. Experts in the field: Medical Billing companies focus on the practice billing. They can point out errors that lead to practices have a high number of rejected claims. Experts at medical billing companies can detect these errors and rectify them that in turn save you money on rejected or returned claims. Office staff is more prone to making errors in billing as they are expected to do other tasks as well at the same time. When you outsource your medical billing to someone or group of people they will make sure that with their dedicated time they make your billing right.

 3. Increased flexibility: when you outsource your medical billing it gives you increased flexibility in tasks and workflows. As having the billing company handles all billing related tasks is one of the best options to get optimum results. Medical billing companies offer services that are customized to your practice. These services usually include posting of co-payments and mail payments, patient statements, concise monthly reporting, quality control audit etc. medical billing companies would allow remote access to view the financial and patient via the internet from your home work. 

 4. Advanced Business Management: Medical Billing Company can become an important business partner. They will provide you with tools such as reports containing the detailed financial health of your practice. Following a close relationship with your medical billing company helps in other areas across the healthcare technology field.

 

 

Solutions to Some Most Common EHR Fears CureMD 09:02

It is time to plunge into the digital age. Transforming to the world of EHR will be part of your future and in 2015 you be penalized financially for not saying compliant. So it is time to stop lagging behind in paper charts, scribbling on super bills and writing barely legible prescriptions.

Some of the most common EHR excuses that clients say often:

1.      It’s expensive

You can’t help not complying with it. If you haven’t complied yet then you have already missed out on Medicare and Medicaid incentives. If you wait then these incentives will decrease every year and if you wait too long you will be penalized in increasing reimbursements. The EHR solutions available in the market will actually save you money and you will be able to eliminate much of your in house IT expenses and completely eliminate the in house billing staff.

2.      I am not tech savvy

There are different kinds of systems available for all kinds of users and some are as easy as using a remote control to your television. Even if you consider yourself as technologically illiterate even then there will be a system out there for you.

3.      Implementation is dreadful

Depending on the type of EHR you select there will be different kinds of dreadful implementations. The key to implementation is to stay ultra organized and systematic training, comprising of real patient interaction and slowly increasing workload. If you do not have anyone on your staff that can do this kind of thing then it is best to seek out help in this area and avoid stress.

4.      I don’t have time to research the products and find the right one for me

In this case get help, there are many professionals who will guide you in selecting the right EHR Software for your practice and providing you client specific wish list of features.

The best way to make sure that the above mentioned problems are answered is to hire a professional to help you and it is not as costly as you think. Here are some aspects to consider when seeking a help from an expert:

•  Seek out an expert who provides a single point of contact 

You and your team need to meet with a single person at a single time. In your meeting with that     person give him/her all the lists of your needs, wants, concerns and special considerations like hardware and budget.

• Make sure your consultant looks through at least 50 EHR companies for your specialty

Your EHR expert needs to sort through the hundreds of practice management and EHRs and make a list of 3 to 5 that answers your needs and specialty in an appropriate way. This approach will help you make sure that your expert is taking care of all the preliminary software demos and providing you a comparison list for you to review.

•   You need to ensure that the expert you selected is comfortable in negotiating the prices, tech support, warranty etc.

 For example many practices have reported saving thousands of dollars in per provider implementation fee.

The era of digital dawn is upon us and what are you waiting for? Don’t miss the chance of receiving your incentives and your reimbursements be penalized?

Chiropractic Billing Software CureMD 08:04

To select the right chiropractic software for your practice is one of the important decisions that you have to make as a doctor or a business owner. There are different vendors available in the market providing chiropractic software. As a doctor you have 2 options regarding claim management and billing.

The first option is to perform the billing in house, which means that your practice staff is responsible for entering details, managing account receivable and sending out claims. The advantage of using the in house staff for billing is that you have full control over the entire process and you can address any issues if it arises. The downside to using in house billing is that it gets costly and you can get into trouble if you have one member responsible for collections or billings and it gets sick or quits their job. This can give halt to the collections and might cost you more money in the long run.             

The other option is to outsource your Medical Billing. Among many industry experts it is very cost effective to outsource your billing as there are no costs of additional employees or expensive hardware. When you outsource the billing you allow the company to handle everything from charge entry, generating claims to managing accounts. Companies that provide outsourcing charge between 6% and 10% of total collections.

Many of billing systems simplify the process of managing claims and billing. You just have to enter the charge into your billing software and send. The claims are sent in a batch electronically to a claims clearing house for processing. The clearing house examines the claims for accuracy before dispatching them off to specific insurance carriers. You will instantly receive an electronic report regarding the status of each claim. If a carrier doesn’t accept any claims electronically then the clearing house will send a paper claim.

Electronic filing helps you save on postage, toner, staff payroll and paper forms. The biggest advantage of filing electronically is the fast turnaround. Electronic claims are usually processed within 7 to 10 days. Compared with the paper claims that can take up to a month to process or sometimes they get lost in the mail. Having electronic filing system helps you eliminate errors, saves money, time and decreases the turnaround time.

Before you decide upon a chiropractic billing software ask your vendor how much they charge for electronic filling as it depends on the clearinghouse that is being used and then markup added by company selling the billing software. So make sure you inquire about the clearing house that is being used by your vendor.

EHR Software for Cardiologists CureMD 12:32

Cardiology Electronic Health Records

The requirements of a cardiology, pulmonary, coronary, cardiac and cardiovascular practices are unique and thus these practices need a specialized cardiology EHR (Electronic Health Records) /EMR (Electronic Medical Records) that caters to the needs of a cardiologist. Cardiologist usually process a lot of paper documents consisting of images, lab results, notes etc and they have started going paperless offices in some big way. Cardiology EHR Software, medical billing system and practice management system are designed to meet the specific needs of a cardiologist’s practice. They help the cardiologist’s in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as coronary artery disease, heart failure, congenital heart defects and electrophysiology besides assisting them achieve financial and operational efficiencies.

Benefits of implementing cardiology EHR Software

Having one of the best Cardiology EHR Software can bring physicians dozens of features and allows for greater automation. Some of the benefits of using a cardiology based EHR are:

• It reduces the time spent on prescription refills and referral letters
• Improve revenues
• Maximize your billing by coding each encounter
• Increase your productivity by automatically generating the progress notes
• Provide enhanced patient care
• Accelerates the reimbursements by reducing the number of rejected claims
• Automatically send the lab orders

Customized for cardiologist

Cardiology EHR/EMR software should be reliable and must meet the specific needs of a cardiologist. It needs to be integrated with practice management system and medical billing. it should allow the practice to verify the diagnosis related to cardiology, using the ICD and procedural CPT codes that are specific to cardiology.

Cardiology EHR Software should be customized to the existing workflows of the practice and should model the existing templates and forms. Chances are that the software will already have a template that can be customized to the cardiology practice.

 Features of Cardiology EHR Software

• HL7 Custom Interfaces
• Server or ASP based
• Custom decision support (ADE, Coding)
• E&M Coding Assistance
• Lab Interface
• Billing/Scheduling Software Interface
• Tablet PC Enabled
• Online Patient Portal
• Document/ Image Management
• PDR Based Prescription Writing

 

Saving yourself from fraudulent EHR documentation CureMD 08:22

The function of EHR is to improve the patient care and reduce the costs associated with it. The downside to it that while using the EHRs it is easier to make errors whether it’s intentional or not and it occurs on a large scale.

Most of the EHR systems would implement macros that allow users to generate a large amount of documentation on a single click. This is called charting and helps in saving lots of time and makes the difficult tasks become less painful. But the user needs to make a careful use of the software to keep it accurate for a particular patient or the user can run the risk of fraudulent documentation.  Many EHRs have a functionality that allows the automatic population of certain parts of patient’s records without relevance to that visit or without providers review; this is known as chart cloning. As a result of it documentation can be created for those services that were not really offered. Upcoding is possible with both these features.

You can be susceptible to suspicion of fraud if you have EHR that automatically generates the codes that are inconsistent with your current level of documentation such as if your EHR tells on how to get higher reimbursement fees or how to generate higher codes or if your patient chart is more strong than it actually was during the patients visit.

Using macro and similar features helps physicians save lots of time spent on documentation and make their jobs look so much easier. But these benefits come with risks and these risks seem to be escalating and the federal has promised to take a closer look at the situation.

You can keep yourself safe against the risk of improper coding by making yourself familiar with the features of your EHR and how to use them safely and effectively. Not all EHRs have the option of auto-population or cloning to maintain the clinical efficiency. Some EHRs are designed in such a way that they avoid the risk of upcoding by allowing providers to capture those elements that populate the patients chart at the point of care without obstructing productivity.

With CMS and other looking for reasons to decrease the payments and with the threat of fraudulent charges hanging over the physician’s heads, it is necessary for physicians to make sure that their documentation is accurate as possible; after all it is the primary goal of EHRs. EHR technology has become an important part of many practices. It is just a tool but how you use it depends on you.