Urgent care billing undergoes many steps during the claim creation process. Because there are so many steps, mistakes can sometimes come up. With these mishaps, health facilities and clinics can go underpaid for their urgent care services. However, there are ways for you to handle this problem. Here are some tips for improving urgent care billing.
Establish Your Contracts
Your clinic must have its contracts established with local payers. If these contracts are not in place, there is a high chance that you either won’t get paid on time or you won’t receive the right amount of money. Ideally, you will have your contracts in place prior to opening your clinic because this means you won’t have to negotiate while you’re waiting for your payments to arrive. If you must negotiate your contracts, you’ll be unable to accept your patients’ insurance coverage. This means you will have to operate solely on cash, resulting in you getting fewer patients.
Use Good Front Desk Practices
Your front desk staff should have the necessary training for checking out your patients’ insurance instead of having to ask if anything has been changed since the last visit. This results in fewer claims getting filed improperly. When information sent to payers is incorrect, it means the information has to be submitted again, or the claim gets denied entirely if it wasn’t sent to the right payer. You will also want your front desk staff to be capable of auditing denied claims occasionally so they can determine if there are any trends between all of the denials.
Don’t Overlook Valuable Charges
Overlooking valuable charges could very easily happen when you consider how hectic everything gets around a medical facility. Among all the oversights that can happen, the most common ones include: X-rays, lab work, reading of results, and blood draws. You need your staff to be trained to find and include these charges otherwise your facility starts giving out free services.
Use the Right Billing Codes
Going with a lower-level code may seem fine when the billing charges are getting coded, but you can often justify using a higher-level code in these instances. When you underestimate the code level on your charges, it can cost you a lot of money. Also, the American Medical Association updates codes on a regular basis, so your staff must be aware of newly updated codes so they can make sure they are using the right ones while billing takes place.
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