It is essential to find ways to reduce expenses and increase revenues if you want to manage your medical practice in absolute financial health. With business expenditure that is escalating at a rapid pace, it becomes vital that you have efficient medical coding and medical billing processes in place that generate accurate and timely revenues to your practice. Without appropriate diagnostic and procedural codes mentioned along with the reimbursement claims, your chances of receiving full reimbursements for the services you have provided are vague. Here are some tips that can help you improve your medical coding process to make it effective and efficient.
- Analyze rejected/denied claims – Your practice may experience claim rejections/denials from time to time. You need to check if these rejections/denials occur rarely or they are occurring regularly. If they have become a common thing in your practice and you have a denial rate above five percent, it means you need to study your coding, billing, and claim submission processes and analyze the reason for your denials. You should ensure that there is proper communication between the healthcare staff, people in medical coding jobs, and medical billers to make certain that the right codes are used for the procedures performed and they are rightly presented in the claims.
- Train staff adequately – For accurate assignment of medical codes to various diagnostic and other procedures it is essential that you train your personnel in medical coding jobs with the latest updates in the different coding systems. Not just the medical coders, but your physicians and other healthcare staff should also be aware of the latest updates and regulations related to documentation and coding. Ongoing training programs help the medical coders and other staff to stay updated with the latest changes in the various coding systems thus, minimizing the chances of coding errors.
- Avoid interruptions – It is estimated that an average team member takes around 20 minutes to return to his/her task with full focus when interrupted. So, it is essential that you ensure your medical coders have no or minimal interruptions by reducing irrelevant team meetings and asking them to mute their social media notifications. This way, medical coders can concentrate on their work without any distractions.
- Limit non-coding tasks – Ensure that your medical coders are doing the work of assigning codes only. If they are playing dual roles by taking up some other additional responsibilities like scheduling, they would be unable to focus on their major task and this may affect their efficacy while assigning codes. As a healthcare facility, if you want correct reimbursements from your insurance companies or want full collections from the patients’ payments, you should ensure that your coders are doing the right job.
- Implement audits – Implement periodical coding compliance audits that can bring the coding issues to the fore and help you address them effectively. Keep your coders informed about the audits and make them understand that these are to improve the quality of coding and are not to assess and punish the coders.
- Outsource – To get the most efficient coding results, you may turn to medical coding services companies that perform the coding and billing tasks for you efficiently. By outsourcing your medical coding process, you will not need to track all the latest coding updates and train your staff as necessary.
Medical coding has a significant impact on your facility’s revenues and hence, you should take proactive measures to identify the issues in your coding process and rectify them. Above mentioned are some of the actionable tips you can practice to eliminate coding inefficiencies and deal with issues like staff shortage, etc. in your healthcare practice. Choose the best medical coding company and outsource your coding process for exceptional coding accuracy and efficiency.