Ensure Complete Medical Billing For Every Encounter

“Don’t Overlook Coding Opportunities For Routine Healthcare Services” is a great article by Greg Freeman on Health Leaders Media’s site. The article talks about a big problem that we see every day, in that providers are not always paying close attention to coding for normal, everyday services, therefore they are not being reimbursed in full…

Excerpt:

“Optimizing your revenue is an ongoing challenge for any physician practice, and the task only gets harder as the healthcare industry changes and reimbursement is restructured. But one way to improve your practice revenue can easily be overlooked in all the effort to accommodate the new factors: making sure you are charging fully for each service that you already provide and not missing out on payment for activities you think are not billable.

Paying close attention to billing for normal, everyday services can significantly increase revenue, says Brian White, founder of Competitive Solutions, a physician practice consulting company in Franklin, Tenn. He typically finds that physician practices fail to bill for 10% to 12% of reimbursement to which they are entitled.

“This results in a tremendous revenue loss. Practices must make sure they are capturing all that they do before they even think about improving revenue with new services or more profitable services,” White says. “So many practices lose money by not charging properly for services like smoking cessation counseling or putting on an elbow brace or a knee brace. There are codes for these things that you may not think about, and you need to make sure you are billing for every single code that you can…”

The article goes on to explain that typically, most of the provider revenue that is lost, is lost because practices do not have controls in place to ensure complete billing for every patient encounter.

Authored by: Greg Freeman on the Health Leaders Media Blog

Read the full original article

View all Articles Mentioned by: Melissa Clark, CCS-P, RT