In their May 6, 2016 newsletter, the AMA stated that: “Patient care is the top priority and a source of passion for physicians, but making sure the business side of your practice is ‘healthy’ also can contribute to better outcomes and patient satisfaction.”
We couldn’t agree more!
This has been GeBBS Healthcare Solutions’ philosophy from day one. If your practice does not have a “healthy” operating margin, you cannot have a patient care mission.
For physicians, getting paid properly for the services they provide is extremely important. Between constantly changing coding rules and dozens of insurance contracts — each with its own coverage, billing and payment terms — many medical practices find it difficult to keep up. As a result, physicians are too often paid less than they actually should be, which impacts their cash flow.
Following are six ways to streamline your revenue cycle and maintain your practice with a “healthy” margin to provide the best patient care possible:
- Pre Visit
- Post Visit
The good news is that you don’t have to take on these tasks by yourself. If you engage an experienced RCM outsourcing partner, you can accomplish all of these crucial functions promptly and efficiently, even though you may have a small internal staff. An outsourcing partner will more than pay for itself by significantly increasing your practice’s insurance payments.
Few words arouse more frustration among physicians than “pre- authorization.” And it’s easy to understand why. The time physicians have to spend persuading an insurance company to cover a medication or procedure is an expensive and annoying distraction from the task of caring for patients.
Practices with more than one location can create greater efficiencies often by centralizing the prior authorization responsibility. Putting just dedicated individuals in charge of prior authorizations for the entire practice will enable those employees to become highly skilled in the process and develop relationships with the payers.
GeBBS’ centralized “Prior Auths” team effectively utilizes payer website access, and phone calls to maintain a stringent turnaround time, saving precious time and money for the practice.
With the Affordable Care Act coming into effect, the volume of self pay has been steadily increasing. The absence of proper insurance and benefit verification is the number one contributor to higher self pay balances downstream. GeBBS provides effective insurance eligibility verification services with the objective of educating patients of their copay and deductibles. GeBBS can go one step forward and collect the payments ahead of the appointment, by accepting credit card and other payment options. This drives higher patient satisfaction.
We also offer high quality coding services to assist in preventing inadequate documentation or coding errors (one of the primary reasons physicians fail to get paid appropriately for their services) by providing highly-trained, certified coders. Our team is comprised of experienced Certified Professional Coders (CPCs) accredited by the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) and Certified Coding Specialists (CCSs) accredited by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).
Proper charge capture enables physicians to create superbills anywhere, anytime, on their PCs, tablets, or smart phones. As the charges are captured as per the system-installed CPT and ICD-10 codes, our services ensure greater accuracy, reduced chance of missed charges, and quicker initiation of the billing process. GeBBS has experience in working with all the leading practice management systems and EMRs.
Accurately recording and managing the vast amount of information associated with patient care—from account creation to payment posting—requires specialized skills and innovative technologies. GeBBS’ expert data capture services are driven by our proprietary workflow application engine. This solution automates the receipt, processing and posting of all RCM paper documents including charges, demographics, insurance payments, patient payments, and correspondence.
Our A/R follow-up solutions can lower internal costs, increase collections, and improve your cash flow. GeBBS’ expert analysts trend denials and look for patterns of deficiency that will increase your cash flow and reduce aging A/R. We specialize in enhancing the financial performance of our clients by seamlessly supporting end-to-end revenue cycle management and its related processes.
We provide access to a scalable and large pool of resources experienced in multiple practice management systems to increase your collections ratio. Our sophisticated A/R workflow tool seamlessly performs skill-based routing. It also generates customized intelligent reports that help quickly identify and resolve unpaid accounts. Our skilled staff is trained to identify patient accounts that require follow-up and take the necessary action to collect unpaid/underpaid claims.
