Chiropractic is a branch of alternative medicine that provides treatment for spine issues. Chiropractors offer rehabilitation procedures for musculoskeletal ailments. These healthcare providers are emerging and becoming popular among the population. Their work is increasing daily in terms of patients and medical billing complexities. Often their work is so much that they have to take the help of professional medical billing services for a better outcome.
Innumerable patients along with administrative workload lead to hassle causing stress. Patient care is the most essential, but one cannot deny the importance of efficient revenue cycle management for financial success.
However, chiropractic medical billing comes with challenges that limit financial performance. To keep the practice successful, chiropractors must streamline their medical billing and enhance the quality of workflow.
For this, chiropractors need to pay attention to their revenue cycle management and take measures to improve the overall functioning. Concentrating on some key elements can benefit healthcare practice and free chiropractors from losing revenue.
In this blog, we will understand the ways to increase chiropractic billing collections and see how outsourcing can help to achieve the goal of financial stability.
Strategies to Enhance Chiropractic Billing Collections
Awareness on Financial Responsibility
It is a proven fact that when patients are aware of their financial responsibility the chances of receiving complete revenue increase. That is why, as a healthcare provider, you must ensure that you convey financial responsibility to your patients.
But what do we mean by financial responsibility? They are the charges that a patient needs to pay for the treatment. This includes different types of charges such as deductibles and co-payments. Often, patients don’t know the details of their insurance coverage and how much they are liable.
It is the responsibility of the chiropractor to educate his patients regarding the same. This will help in communication and also benefit the revenue cycle management.
Verification of Insurance
The second important strategy is the verification process. Every insurance coverage is different, and it determines the terms and conditions of receiving reimbursement. It helps in determining insurance coverage status before the appointment. Insurance coverage holds important patient demographic information and an error in that would make the practice liable to revenue loss.
Considering all this, you must make sure to double-check and verify the insurance. This will help in avoiding errors and mistakes related to issues that arise during medical billing. It will also enable proactive patient collection which is better for collection.
Maintain the accuracy of Coding
One area where the greatest number of mistakes happen is coding. Mistakes in coding lead to denials which further require corrective action. That is why preventing errors by making sure that there are the least number of mistakes in coding is beneficial.
This step requires extensive knowledge of CPT and ICD codes along with modifiers for the field of chiropractic care.
As a chiropractor, you must be specialized in coding for your branch of medicine to not miss out on any relevant codes. You can also prefer getting help from a chiropractic medical billing company. This way you will get solutions to all your hassles of medical billing including coding.
Verification of Charge Capture
When looking for valuable strategies, you cannot miss the step of charge capture. This process of converting patient services into charges is essential to prevent revenue leakage. Performing this step properly prevents your practice from under or over-coding.
Efficient verification of charge capture will prevent your practice from unnecessary expensive audits and legal penalties in case of under-coding.
For increased chiropractic billing collection, focus on maintaining the accuracy of charge capture and ensure a smooth administrative flow.
Timely Submission of Claims
Insurance companies set a defined time for the submission of claims and failure to submit within the stipulated time leads to denial of claims. This results in a negative impact on revenue as recovering all the denied amounts may not always be possible.
As a chiropractor who wants to improve his revenue cycle, you must ensure that all submissions are on time. Avoiding time delays will prevent you from delays in your payment status.
To elevate collections and eliminate the burden of medical billing, you can opt for outsourcing to a chiropractic medical billing company. Your outsourcing partner will handle all the steps in the process of medical billing and ensure the timely submission of claims.
Prioritize Denials and AR Follow-Up
Handling two things may have its cause and effect on the administrative process with errors that result in denials. However, denials are common, and often with good corrective measures, you can regain the lost revenue. For this, you need efficient denial management. Denial management identifies the area of errors, analyzes the mistakes, and rectifies where possible. Almost half of the denials are recoverable with good denial management.
Apart from that, you must not ignore AR days and outstanding amounts and take action to improve collections. As a chiropractor, prioritizing denials and AR follow-up can have a significant improvement in revenue collections.
With the above-mentioned strategies, you can enhance your financial performance leading to a constant flow of revenue. However, streamlining the workflow is still complicated and hard to achieve. Here, medical billing professionals come into play with solutions to all the challenges of chiropractic medical billing.
Outsourcing a chiropractic billing company will take care of healthcare practice to a new level of financial achievement. Further, the stress of managing administrative tasks with patient care will also be eliminated.
Benefits of Outsourcing Chiropractic Billing Services are:
Improved Billing Compliance
As healthcare deals with the lives of numerous individuals, this field is highly regulated. These regulations are for the benefit of patients and protect them from any kind of misuse. When it comes to medical billing, a similar concept is applied, and sensitive patient information is protected. The most important regulatory standard that comes into play is HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).
HIPAA protects patient information from the potential threat of exploitation. Outsourcing partners ensure compliance with HIPAA for the protection of patient information. They follow all the steps to meet the compliance requirements and ensure accurate billing practices that are also ethical.
Faster Reimbursements
Outsourcing partners solve the issue of human errors by automating the complete process of medical billing. The automated process essentially tackles the present and future challenges and enhances efficiency along with billing accuracy and operational capacity.
Apart from that, they spend their valuable time creating appropriate policies for billing and coding, staying current with the changes, investing in advanced technology, and negotiating with insurance companies.
This way, an outsourcing partner helps your practice get faster reimbursement as forecasting AR days becomes easy. All these efforts result in less payment processing time leading to better chiropractic medical billing.
Management of Denied Claims
The reasons for claim denials can be many, amidst the challenges chiropractors may find it hard to manage them all. Usually, errors occur due to disregarding minor details that further develop into claim denials.
Professional and experienced chiropractic billing services take all the measures to avoid denials by ensuring accuracy at every step. You can transfer all your burden of managing denials to a chiropractic medical billing company and focus on patient care.
Regular and Insightful Reporting
One thing that in-house medical billing lacks is regular and insightful reporting about the complete process of chiropractic billing. Keeping such reports helps in improving collections and analyzing workflow to make appropriate changes.
Outsourcing partners are known for maintaining timely and detailed reports of various aspects. They also go a step further by keeping their clients updated by sharing these reports. This helps in the overall improvement of total functionality.
Qualified Billing Experts
Documentation errors, improper coding, mistakes in modifiers as well as delays in form filling and submission of claims are the major complexities of chiropractic medical billing that hampers the revenue cycle management.
Outsourcing a medical billing specialist will give you access to billing and coding experts well-versed in dynamic codes, and frequently changing guidelines & regulations. This will allow your practice to prevent errors related to codes and submissions and reach the ultimate goal of maximizing collections.
Years of experience in the field of medical billing gives outsourcers an upper hand in the critical functions of chiropractic medical billing. A chiropractic billing company effortlessly generates revenue through timely and error-free submissions.
Choose Unify Healthcare Services as your Chiropractic billing partner
If you have reached the end of this blog, you might have understood the essential strategies and benefits of professional medical billing services. However, the pool of available options is vast enough to make selecting one perfect partner confusing.
Unify Healthcare Services is the outsourcing partner you are looking for. They have a team of knowledgeable and experienced billers and coders for chiropractic billing collections. It is a professional chiropractic medical billing company well-equipped to handle a multitude of patients every day.
