Best Ways to Spot your Medical Billing Errors

Medical billing errors is costing medical practitioners with enough money. There are chances that millions of Americans are overpaying due to these errors. Medical inaccuracies such as wrong information, incorrect insurance ID number and inflated quantity of services leads to billing errors.

In order to protect your wallet,  you needs to careful checking that the right amount is paid.

Common Medical Billing Errors are:

• Entering Incorrect Information of Patient
• Incorrect information of the Provider
• Inserting confused or wrong codes such as CPT codes and HIPAA compliance.
• Incorrect diagnostic codes and mismatch treatment
• Skipping input codes performed by healthcare official and physicians.
• Input mismatch diagnostic and treatment codes.

Every data has to be accurate in order to get processed correctly. Make sure that you are familiarized with relevant codes, insurance information, providers prior to filing a claim.

Apart from these errors, other common billing errors are:

• Not verifying Patient’s insurance Coverage

Health insurance of patient can change at any time without even knowing. It’s crucial to verify your insurance coverage.

• No Access to EOBs on Denied Claims

In some cases insurance company forget to attach EOB to denied claim. Well in such cases, you are not aware of the reason claim denial. This error can be reduced by keeping track of the denied claims at the time one receives them.

• Duplicate Billing

This issue usually occurs when you bill for a single service more than once. Usually, this happen when one person prepares the bill without checking reports about services. The best way to avoid these error is by keeping extra vigilance about these suspicious entries on superbills of the patient and communicate with physicians regarding the concerns.

Billing Errors beyond your control are:

• Undercoding

This usually happens medical code or physician leaves some code out of the superbill. At times, healthcare providers intentionally undercode to avoid or minimize audits.  

• Careless Documentation

Maximum billing errors come when healthcare providers or physicians turn in careless documentation.

• Upcoding

When medical coders put codes for services that are not received, upcoding occurs. The total amount gets inflated. This can result in criminal prosecution and fines.

How to catch and correct errors

• Coordinate with Provider’s office

Physicians and personnel who are in charge of insurance information and co pay should contribute to the superbill. Any issue before submitting the claim should be checked with them.

• Check the insurance and patient information twice

Always check your information twice to avoid these simple yet frequently occurring errors.

• Follow Up

You can anticipate errors by maintaining chain of follow up. Insurance company representative can tell you about the errors they find and thereby offering you an opportunity to resubmit denied claim.  

• Staying in touch with coding and billing trends

Stay updated with the latest billing codes, modifications in healthcare regulations, new treatments, newfound illness and new treatments. You can even hire medical coding and billing company to avoid such errors and stay updated.