08 Dec FAQ: A Conversation with Dr. Swann
Dr. Swann answers five frequently asked questions on how medical practice costs can be saved by outsourcing your financial responsibilities and billing tasks to a professional service (such as Practice Support): 1
1) How can an external billing service help with legacy billing?
As a billing service, this means going through all claims over (at least) the past year, scrubbing those claims, and determining if any money has been left on the table.
Legacy billing is billed at a higher rate because it involves a good amount of investigation, which we already do if you’re one of our existing clients.
Practice Support has been very successful at legacy billing and has saved each of our clients tens of thousands of dollars.
Legacy billing requires no effort on the client’s part; it’s essentially ‘free money’ that we, as Practice Support, will find for you.
You are saved the time and effort to go through the process, and it allows us also to identify errors in current billing practices and help identify ways that Practice Support can help support your organization.
2) How does a billing service handle denied claims?
As a rule of thumb, we identify denied claims more quickly and bring those to the clinician’s attention along with the reason for the denial.
This prevents successive loss of revenue where you may have a denied claim. You’ll be able to continue seeing the patient without a clear answer about the reason for the denial.
Because we have an entire team working on your behalf, we can devote the resources to find out the reason for the claim denial so that corrections to errors can be implemented quickly, preventing future loss of revenue and improving your standard operating procedure.
3) Will a billing service get involved with authorizations and benefits?
For testing clients and primary care physicians, we isolate what insurance will and will not pay for and how many units they will and will not pay for.
Everything is noted in patients’ charts. So, when treating patients, we make it very easy to understand what’s covered and what’s not for each insurance, which can help you determine whether or not you need to file additional prior authorizations, saving you more money (at least 25%).
4) Is it part of the billing service’s remit to look at patient obligations?
Patient’s obligations can include co-pays and co-insurance, and Practice Support is very detailed in outlining what a patient’s responsibility is for the services rendered.
Practice Support delivers their clients a detailed analysis of what each patient owes and sends out statements to those patients on behalf of those clients. So, we’re good at helping our clients not leave those patient obligations on the floor.
5) How often will the practice’s bills be reviewed?
Practice Support does quarterly billing reviews to target the type of analysis the client thinks is important and the ones that we think are important.
This ties up any leaks and potential future losses for revenue. Reviews can be done as often as possible, quarterly in year one and biannually after that. Our lead actuary and billing team compile reviews to mitigate all future revenue loss. If you want to learn more about outsourcing your practice finances, click here to contact Dr. Swann or one of our team for a free consultation
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