The following constitutes a healthy revenue cycle management:
- Patient Pre-Authorization
- Eligibility & Benefits Verification
- Claims Submission
- Payment Posting
- Denial Management
- Reporting
Of all these critical processes required for an effective revenue cycle management, payment posting is one of the most crucial ones. Although it seems like a simple process, payment posting if gone wrong can disarray the finance of the medical practice.
How can an error-free payment posting benefit your medical practice?
- Correct payment posting affects the whole claim processing. If there is a mistake in initial posting, the secondary and tertiary payers will get billed incorrectly. Similarly, an accurate payment posting reduces the denial resolution time. Hence it is necessary to keep the staff updated with the latest billing/ coding, insurance payers instruction and other important correspondence to resolve the denial as soon as possible.
- Accurate payment posting helps in to analyze the revenue cycle, helping it identify an area that needs improvement. It also helps in reducing the account receivable days, strengthening the revenue cycle management and improving its efficiency.
Abide by these healthy billing practices to optimize your payment posting:
Communicate better with patients
Patients, after all, are your consumers, what they are going to say the minute they step out of your practice is going to influence your revenue inflow at some level. Hence it is necessary that you communicate well with your patients. We’re not suggesting, you be busy on the phone solving their minor queries, but we are talking about your online presence via an electronic health record portal or software. This will help your medical practice in engaging more patients and motivating them to pay earlier.
Harness evolving payment technologies
It will help you if you make it a habit to send out an electronic statement regarding the payment to the patients as soon as they leave the healthcare center. For better convenience of the patient as well as the service provider, more and more organizations are including automatic payment. Utilizing technology will help in decreasing the operating costs from electronic transactions, lowering the number of write-offs. Automation like every sector will assist in enhancing productivity and efficiency, which will ultimately increase the cash flow and lead to better collections.
Diversify payment methods
With almost everybody using all three payment methods, every healthcare service provider must have the requisite machine to accept payment via any method: debit card, credit card or cash.
Collect payment on-site
If the medical service provider does not collect payment as soon as the patients check in or are getting the service done, the probability of receiving payment gets delayed to a significant level. You will have to inculcate this practice in your staff members by motivating them
Integrate your payment processing with healthcare workflow
To give your patients the freedom to pay your medical practice by web, by mail, by phone and via payment plans, it’s imperative that all subsystems of healthcare systems and payment processing are well-integrated. This will promote improved reporting, enhance operational efficiencies and benefit the overall financial performance.
It is necessary to optimize payment posting for streamlining medical billing to promote healthy revenue cycle management. Even better an option would be if you consult a medical billing and coding company for revenue cycle management. Outsourcing a proficient billing and coding service will lead to quicker and efficient revenue generation with reduced errors. They will effectively manage all the billing operations, so that time and money otherwise wasted on hiring and training staff members for in-house billing and collections services can be utilized on developing the practice to provide better service to the patients.
