Do not Let Insufficient Dermatology Medical Billing Slow Down Your Profitability

November 03, 2021, bestturtlebeach

Dermatologists throughout the U.S. continuously struggle to collect what they actually owe. The majority of them lose millions of dollars annually just because of inefficient and poor dermatology medical billing practices. The most common factors that slow down the productivity and efficiency of the revenue cycle management is insufficient or lack of medical documentation, not billing patients, incorrect payment posting, lack of follow-up for payments and failure to collect outstanding accounts receivable (A/R).

Which results in risking hundreds of thousands of dollars lost over an extending period of time. In order to unleash the revenue, that is being locked in the inefficient lab dermatology billing systems. It’s imperative for the health care providers to watch their business closely, monitor the performance of billing staff, revenue cycle management and implement the appropriate controls as well as reports in order to identify the symptoms and causes of the significant loss. Then apply the best-suited dermatology billing solutions to get the financial peace of mind you actually deserve.

Keeping your revenue stream flowing is not only crucial to keeping pace with the fast-paced healthcare industry. But it is also important to stand strong against the financial challenges in the future as well. For instance, the medical practices, having optimised cash reserves and RCM processes, managed to survive the current economic downturn_caused by the ongoing pandemic. And more importantly, thrive afterwards. Do you want to break the growth barriers and streamline the dermatology medical billing services? Here is the expert’s advice that you should follow to save your cash flow and bottom line from any uncertainties.

Strive For a 95% Clean Claims Rate

A clean medical claim refers to a claim, that contains no potential errors and is being accepted by the insurance companies in the first place. The rate of claims success indicates the financial stability and sustainability of the medical practice. According to the industry experts, just like other practitioners, dermatologists should strive to achieve a clean claim rate as higher as possible, i.e. 95%. But unfortunately, it has been estimated that very few health care organisations managed to reach this target. If your dermatology practice is facing a clean claims rate lower than 95%. Then its simply implies that you are leaving your hard-earned revenue on the table.

In addition to this, the rejected or denied claims increase the administrative expenses of the providers. Such expenses can lead to a quick add-up in your budget and directly affect the profitability factor. Hence, the higher your clean claim rate, the less valuable time and money you will spend trying to rework claims. In order to achieve this desired clean claims rate, you must streamline the dermatology medical billing services first. For this purpose, make sure that claims are being submitted according to the following standards.

Claims must be prepared and submitted with accurate patients’ demographic information such as; name, date of birth, gender, age, phone number, social security number, insurance policy number, etc.

Insurance information must be up-to-date. For this purpose, ask your new and established patients to bring the insurance card at every visit.

Prior authorization is very important to prevent claim rejections. So, before providing any type of dermatology-related services and procedures, don’t forget to get approval from the insurance companies. That is whether or not they pay for that particular service.

Use the precise diagnostic and procedural medical codes to report the patients’ diagnoses, injuries, illnesses,  treatments, medical services and procedures.

Don’t forget to perform claims scrubbing before the final submission to the payers. Because an efficiently managed scrubbing process sets the claims free from errors and prevents claim rejection.

After double-checking the claims, now make sure that your billing staff file the claims in a given time window of the insurance agencies.

It's Time to Take Measures:

Appropriate filling out claim forms, avoiding errors like incorrect patient or insurance information, duplicate billing, coding errors can not only result in faster reimbursements. But it also saves a considerable amount of time and money, that are supposed to be spent reworking the denied or rejected claims. Thus, keep in mind the above-mentioned tricks and get the most out of your dermatology medical billing system.
 

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