Are you feeling frustrated or distracted due to the complex and hectic procedure of lab billing and coding? Don’t worry, outsourcing laboratory billing services is the right choice for you. Moreover, just like other businesses, revenue generation is considered as the backbone of lab practices. But in today’s challenging economy patients are reluctant to pay their copayments and deductibles. These issues interrupt the cash flow and sometimes cause lab professionals to shut down their practices.
But outsourcing medical laboratory billing services can improve the economic condition of your business. Service providers take responsibility and work on your behalf to ensure timely and maximum reimbursements. They allow you to focus on your primary concerns including patients care and business relations. No doubt, outsourcing plays a crucial role in your financial stability, but a decision of choosing the wrong service providers can lead to a debacle of your practice.
Therefore, lab professionals must carefully choose their billing partners. Meanwhile, laboratory billing services must adopt innovative ways to deliver quality care and lower costs services to streamline the cash flow of medical practice. But here’s a question that arises: how medical laboratory billing services can be improved? Read the following tips to find your answer.
1. Collect respectfully
In the healthcare industry, everyone focuses on the transparency and collection of money. But unfortunately, there are few people who talk about the element of respect. When you adopt a policy of respect and transparency, it not only optimizes the revenue cycle, it also helps to create a good reputation for your organization.
On the other hand, aggressive collection efforts and rude behavior with patients can harm the trust and patient-provider relationship. This negatively impacts the reputation of your practice and might be possible that you see a surprising decrease in patients’ visits.
2. Provide cost estimates
If laboratory billing services providers are looking for further improvements in their services, they should shift their attention to satisfying their clients. One thing they can do to build trust is the provision of cost estimation tools.
Such tools can enhance the lab billing process by automatically calculating estimated charges for patients’ visits. It helps to educate the patients about their financial responsibility. In this way, you can give providers a better understanding of the costs for the services they recommend.
3. Flexible payment options
If you want to get paid faster, you should use the payment methods which are easy and convenient for your patients. To make it easier and possible, you can offer them online payment options so they can easily use their debit or credit cards to pay from anywhere.
By offering convenient ways of payment, your patients will be more satisfied with your services. It ultimately benefits your business. Moreover, it’s imperative to ensure that patients receive timely statements that are clear easy to read.
4. Staff Training
In order to keep pace with the fast-evolving healthcare industry, employees should keep themselves updated with the deleted, new or modified rules and guidelines.
If laboratory billing services hire an inexperienced billing staff, they might be harmful to your reputation among clients. So, service providers should invest time and money in employee training. Moreover, the right software is not only the key to manage lab billing and coding efficiency. But your employees and management team should be capable to use that software.
5. Streamline Claims Processing
It is a fact that the optimization of revenue cycle management mainly depends on the timely submission of clean claims. No, doubt, claims processing is quite a complicated and time-consuming procedure but the outsourced billing team has certified coders who have intensive experience in this field.
Therefore, service providers should understand the importance of time when it comes to filing claims. If you are filing claims after the time limit, then you may face claim denials or rejections. Which ultimately disturbed the cash flow of practice. So, try to streamlines the submission process of medical claims.
6. Use the latest technology
The use of the latest and innovative software for lab billing and coding, helps service providers to get an idea of whether claims are likely to be accepted or denied. The premium quality software automatically updates the ever-changing rules, which educates providers about new trends in denials.
So we can say that the use of the right software can push lab billers toward increasing the amount they can collect for clients.
7. Effective denial management
Effective management of rejected or denied claims is the most important aspect of the revenue cycle. It requires more time and highly-trained staff. Before stepping into further details, it’s important to take about the difference between rejected and denied claims.
A rejected medical claim is one that hasn’t been processed yet because of the identification of one or more errors. Errors may include wrong patient information, codes, or a mismatched procedure.
On the other hand, a claim which is deemed unpayable by the insurance company is said to be a denied claim. It may contain a violation of the payer-patient contract or some major error found after processing. So, effectively managing the rejected, especially denied claims for even laboratory billing services provider is not an easy task.
But if you are going to provide lab medical billing services, you must have an efficient and well-experienced task force that can perform their duties in effective ways. Moreover, they should carefully check for errors in a claim to minimize the occurrence of rejections and denials. Because effective denial management can optimize the revenue cycle of any practice.
Conclusion
Lab billing services providers should continuously strive to improve the experience of their clients. By maximizing reimbursements and minimizing claim rejections or denials, they should help lab professional to collect the maximum revenue. Implementing proactive billing procedures results in streamlined cash flow, efficient operations, and ultimately a better overall experience for health practitioners.
If your lab practice is facing slow revenue cycle management or an increasing number of denied or rejected claims, Laboratory Billings is the most suitable option for you. It provides the most reliable laboratory billing services in the United States. We deliver consistent results to clients with greater efficiency.
