How to Stay On Top of Medical Invoices

Medical invoicing is essential to all healthcare business practices, and they are both a record of treatment and a bill. Medical invoices provide a summarised list of all healthcare treatments offered, including medical equipment, medication, and other medical services. They are essential in providing a documented record of important information for reimbursement purposes and traceability and transparency of companies.

Medical invoices can be a tedious process, with over 80% of medical invoicing containing errors to some degree. It is vital to track all medical information with accurate numbers to ensure your healthcare practice is compliant with regulatory and law policies and ensuring claims can be submitted promptly. Not only this, but you can free up time that can be used by attending to your patient’s needs. 

How do you do medical billing?

There are various ways you can do medical billing, and it is advised to choose an option that best suits the needs of your healthcare practice. 

While medical billing can be done by hand, paper methods are not the most efficient way to organize and prepare information for claims submission. Data could be misinterpreted, and it is vastly more challenging to ensure consistency across each document. Not to mention timely, as far more effort and energy is required to filter through information, apply it to medical codes, and compile it in the correct format for review. 
The most common method is using medical billing software that automates this process, such as Carepatron. Advanced software systems such as these significantly reduce the risk of errors that can disrupt your revenue stream. Typographical and coding errors can be easily identified and removed to ensure that medical bills are accurate and correctly display the reimbursement of medical services.

It is vitally important to stay on top of medical invoices to ensure compliance and responsibility for your healthcare practice and make sure you don’t miss out financially. There is approximately USD 125 billion uncollected revenue each year due to a lack of care towards medical invoices. So it is immensely economically beneficial for you to ensure you have a management protocol in place to attend to medical invoicing and bills. While companies such as Carepatron provide software to help educate and build successful healthcare businesses, it is essential to incorporate these tips into your practice:

• Promptly respond to rejected claims - A rejected claim has not been processed due to errors and is edited and resubmitted. A denied claim has been processed and contains violations or errors that prevent payables and must be appealed. This can be a time-consuming and costly process, so handling claims quickly by checking errors and clarifying problems can save time for your practice to focus on other endeavors. 
• Have good claim management - Claims based on incorrect billing can result in a long resubmission process that requires editing, amending, and resubmitting. This can quickly become complicated, and when considering 80% of medical bills contain errors, it is essential to ensure they’re correct. This means having accurate patient and insurance information, as well as excellent documentation with clear coding. 
• Establish clear collections - Clarifying patient expectations of what they need to pay through reminding them of their obligations will minimize patient misunderstandings. In the case of law, this also means reducing the risk of patients who may feign ignorance when paying certain costs. Patient information, such as ID and verified addresses, should be collected upfront, with co-pay plans and eligibility confirmed. 
• Be open to improvement - As there are continual improvements within healthcare policies, tracking the performance of your healthcare clinic can help identify issues and highlight improvements. Staying informed on the changing medical billing rules and being educated on policies can increase the standard of care for your healthcare practice. This is in addition to identifying problems such as declined or late payments. 
• Outsource appropriately - Recognising that outsourcing workers specializing in a particular medical billing skill are a great asset to your healthcare business. Outsourcing dedicated specialists can mean that they are specifically trained in coding and billing, which reduces the likelihood of errors. Claim submissions can be processed faster, and doctors and nurses can focus on their patients, all while your practice complies with up-to-date standards. ‍
• Reduce coding mistakes - Incorrect, missing, or mismatched codes can lead to a lengthy submission process that requires further editing and resubmission. Errors may include using non-specific diagnosis codes and incorrect modifiers, upcoding where more expensive procedures are added, or under coding with less costly procedures added. To avoid this and maintain compliance, it is best to ensure you double-check all coding to increase medical billing accuracy.

To ensure you are producing medical bills of the highest quality, we have compiled a list of common errors that you should be aware of and take care of. Over 20% of medical invoices are rejected, which can be very costly for businesses, and so keeping these in mind will reduce the risk of this occurring.

• Check insurance eligibility - Patients’ insurance coverage can very quickly change year to year. So one of the first steps is making sure that you have the most recent information concerning patients’ insurance. Mainly as every company differs in policy, and so some procedures may not be covered. 
• Coding mistakes - Codes must match procedures performed, and sometimes it can be challenging to keep up with coding standards. It is easy to make coding errors. However, mistakes can mean inaccurate bills, which in turn leads to claims needing to be resubmitted. Taking extra care to prevent this from happening is of high importance.
• No attention to detail - Mismatched names and inputting errors, big or small, can result in claims needing to be resubmitted. Medical invoices must be very pedantic concerning all parties to ensure that they represent medical services used and are accurate. 
• Delayed filing - Whether medical records are lost, or you encounter problems retrieving patient information, delayed filing can result in loss of revenues. This can also be troublesome for patients who have to wait longer for their invoices.
• Bill duplication - This is usually a human error, but if a claim has already been filed and sent again, this can cause issues on the claim finalization end. This is best avoided by double-checking information to ensure that once a medical bill or invoice is completed and sent, it is not touched again unless required. 
• Miscommunication - During hectic days, sometimes procedures aren’t followed very closely. This can result in incomplete information and communication gaps, all of which could confuse later processes.
• Poor protocols - The proper management should be in place to minimize errors, ensure policies are up to date, and ensure employees are educated in medical invoicing processes. This minimizes the chances of misconduct and fraud on the part of the employee. ‍
• Unbundling - Services performed together should be billed as one under a bundled code, which also allows for greater convenience.

Medical invoicing is an essential component of a successful healthcare practice, and while this can be a complicated process, it doesn’t have to be. There are a lot of coding and billing rules, laws, and policies to consider in the invoicing process that is constantly being updated and reviewed. Using a healthcare software platform, such as Carepatron, you can alleviate any stresses embedded in the process, with the automated software taking care of all your medical invoicing needs. Templates and resources can ensure you consistently apply the correct codes to your medical services and bill the right information for claims. 

Regardless of the platform, you use to produce medical invoices; you must realize the significance of getting it right. Doing so will allow you to provide the highest level of care for your patients and ensure that your healthcare practice is compliant and professional. 

Further reading:

• Catastrophic Out-of-Pocket Health Care Costs: A Problem Mainly for Middle-Income Americans with Employer Coverage
• Americans now spend twice as much on health care as they did in the 1980s