Billing Depot

PHYSICIANS PRACTICE
How to Use Electronic Billing Service, Steve Rebagliati, May 4, 2005, The Tech Doctor, vol.1, no.1

FINANCIAL PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
Protect Your Practice with a Buy-Sell Agreement, George Reilly, MetLife, May 2005

Asset Allocation for Financial Risk Management, Robert Szigeti, UBS, May 2005

Retirement Plan for Medical Practice Owners and Employees, Robert Szigeti, UBS, May 2005

ARTICLES
Appointment Reminders for Medical Billing Revenue Protection and Patient Relationship Management
When patients miss appointments, they interrupt the flow of patient care, impede clinic productivity, and signal an eroding patient loyalty. A missed appointment amounts to missed billing revenue, lost money, or a deserting patient. Reminder calls for upcoming appointments and follow up calls on recent no-shows are effective strategies for billing revenue protection because they reduce numbers of no-shows and help early identification of incipient patient attrition and other patient relationship problems.

3 Best Strategies to Reduce Patient No-Shows and Improve Medical Practice Billing Revenues
When patients miss appointments, they interrupt the flow of patient care and impede clinic productivity. A missed appointment amounts to reduced billing and missed revenue. The rate of no-shows runs at thirty percent for the average Family Practice clinic. Worse, if the clinicians are part-time or full-time staff rather than contracted, they sit idle on the company clock. In this case, a missed appointment is not just a missed opportunity for revenue; it's lost money with each passing minute.

Medical Billing and Intelligent SOAP Notes
Doctors and therapists must produce clinical documentation in ever increasing volumes and detail to ensure best healthcare, get medical claims paid in full and on time, and protect the practice from post-payment audits and unfair litigation. SOAP notes must not merely emulate the paper folder that every doctor has for every patient. They must use computer technology to help automate routine tasks and create a faster, easier, and error free process to increase practice profitability and reduce its audit risks.

How to Export Vericle Reports to Excel for Medical Billing Analysis
Until recently, the use of Excel for medical billing analysis has been limited because of the difficulty to produce effective ad hoc reports and inability to export data into Excel. Vericle lifts the limitation with its integrated medical billing reporting and a 2-step Excel export capability.

6 Worst Payer Trends to Impede Medical Billing
Healthcare insurance business continued to boom in 2006, mostly at the expense of both providers and patients. A review of recent healthcare insurance industry trends help identification of six payer activities that will impact medical billing and healthcare providers revenue in 2007.

Improve Patient Loyalty with Integrated Medical Billing, SOAP Notes, and Scheduling Systems
Patient loyalty is key to continued practice success in terms of both recurring and new revenue. Frequent patient communication is the only effective way to increase the likelihood of timely loyalty problem identification and resolution. Such patient communications can be driven by a any of the practice management components, starting with patient scheduling, to SOAP notes, to special health care literature, to medical billing, insurance payments, copays, and deductibles.

Chiropractic Billing Audits - How Payers Are Getting Away with Practice Murder
In its January 2007 issue, Today's Chiropractic examines an unprecedented growth of post-payment audits by insurance companies. It appears that while the motive is money and the means is a gargantuan statistical database, every provider is an opportunity. To manage audit risk, providers need a system, modeled on the insurers' own, which stores claims data and generates reports for the benefit of participating providers.

Grow Revenues in Chiropractic Clinic With Point of Service Sales of Retail Products
In 2006, two out of three chiropractors increased billings (67%), while almost ninety percent (88.3%) of chiropractors sold retail products to patients. At an average $28.5 collections per patient visit (PVA), retail product sales to patients remains a major revenue source. But for junior practitioners with a humble patient growth record, point of service sales is the fastest way to increase practice revenue.

NPI for Compliant Medical Billing – a Payer's Opportunity to Streamlined Operations
Poor health care provider's data quality affects virtually every aspect of health care payer's enterprise, diluting profits and member goodwill. Successful transition to NPI impacts eligibility and authorization processing, provider enrollment, contracts and directories, claims adjudication and payment, referrals, and reporting and presents a unique opportunity for added automation, improved data accuracy, lower fraud and abuse, and streamlined operations.

5 Facts about NPI for HIPAA Compliant Medical Billing
The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) established national privacy and security standards for electronic health care transactions, including a national identifier for providers, health plans and employers. Accordingly, by May 23, 2007, healthcare providers and all health plans and clearinghouses must change both their processes and information systems to implement HIPAA's National Provider Identifier (NPI) regulations.

How to Get NPI - National Provider Number for HIPAA-Compliant Medical Billing in 7 Steps
HIPAA's Administrative Simplification provision becomes mandatory on May 23, 2007. It requires all health care providers to obtain a National Provider Identifier number or NPI. Getting an NPI is free - not having one can be costly: If you delay applying for your NPI, you risk your cash flow.

Outsourced Debt Collections for Medical Practice - Top 5 Criteria to Better Billing Performance
Debt collection from patients is a conflict doctors often prefer avoiding for fear of potential implications to practice reputation and increased exposure to malpractice lawsuits. Healthcare debt collections require unique combination of sensitivity, skill, and discipline. Understanding of debt collections process and outsourcing opportunities help the practice owner improve revenue cycle while minimizing practice risks.

Top 3 Methods for No-Show Reduction in Medical Practice - Missed Appointment Risk Management
Most clinics lose an average of 20% of their revenue due to missed appointments. Besides lost revenue, no-show risks span health damage, patient liability, reduced accessibility, and impeded resident education. Rigorous no-show management methods, based on integrated scheduling and billing data and outsourced reminder programs, reduce no-show rates and improve associated revenues by more than 50%.

Top Four Reports for Chiropractic Patient Relationship Management and Outsourced Billing Service
Patient Relationship Management is a catalyst for building successful and competitive chiropractic clinics. Integrated systems, available under an outsourced software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, combining data about patient's health, care plans, and billing, are cornerstone for Patient Relationship Management. A disciplined practice manager reviews End-Of-Day and Financial Care Tracking reports daily to monitor and reconcile average patient visits, missed appointments, recalls, new patients, charges, and collections.

Best-Of-Breed Outsourced Medical Billing Service and SaaS EMR - Eight-Step Implementation Plan
The increasing reliability of the Internet technology and standardization of systems interfaces have recently enabled comprehensive "best-of-breed" configurations of modern EMR software and billing service, made available to physicians under the "pay-as-you-go" business model. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model allows physicians to confirm the benefits of technology solutions first and pay later. While such solutions deliver multiple risk management and operations control benefits, they also require disciplined implementation processes.

Integrated Best-Of-Breed Outsourced Billing Service and SaaS EMR - Eight Transition Challenges
The limited choice between mediocre full-scope products and excellent single-function systems has been expanding in step with increasing reliability of the Internet technology and standardization of systems interfaces. Comprehensive integrated best-of-breed solutions combining modern EMR software and billing service can be utilized under the "pay-as-you-go" business model. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model allows physicians to confirm the benefits of technology solutions first and pay later. While such solutions deliver multiple risk management and operations control benefits, they also pose significant transition challenges.

Vertical Outsourcing - Seven Key Features of Integrated Pathology Lab Workflow and Billing Solutions
Pathologist must track the workflow of the entire laboratory from receiving a sample and requisition form, to accessioning, to patient demographics, to history, to gross, dictation, proof, distribution, and billing. Pathology billing is especially complicated because it requires data flowing between multiple systems and because it requires sophisticated measures to prevent case loss and ensure full and timely payment. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions provide integrated workflow tracking and billing and represent the new generation of information technology for pathology labs, driven exclusively by performance and profitability.

Denial Management - Four-Stage Process to Improve Medical Billing Performance
Partial denials cause the average medical practice lose as much as 11% of its revenue. Denial management is difficult because of complexity of denial causes, payer variety, and claim volume. Systematic denial management requires measurement, early claim validation, comprehensive monitoring, and custom appeal process tracking.

Chiropractic Billing and Patient Relationship - Nine Criteria for Best Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pushes the limits of outsourcing and reduces the exorbitant costs of specialized practice management software. SaaS model is available for all aspects of chiropractic clinic management, including scheduling, billing, and SOAP note documentation, which are mission-critical for high quality health care, practice building, and regulatory compliance.

How To Get Paid in Full and On Time - Top Five Measures of Chiropractic Billing Performance
Effective practice management depends on solid billing performance. Its measurement is an integral part of practice management process and its importance grows in step with growth of patient volume. Traditional billing metrics are limited in scope and focus on claim submission process, ignoring process imperfections on the insurance (payer) side. Modern computer technologies allow both measurement and action to improve revenue cycle efficacy and efficiency.

Practice Made Perfect - Top Ten Criteria for Chiropractic Billing and Office Management Solutions
Increasing regulatory scrutiny, poor in-house billing performance, and rapid technology progress are key growth drivers in chiropractic information technology. On one hand, thousands of outsourced billing solutions and software vendors ensure continued competitiveness in terms of both service quality and pricing. On the other hand, the lack of standards and uniform metrics among the vendors, combined with their large numbers, frustrates the selection process. Ten effective guidelines streamline outsourced solution selection process and reduce vendor switching costs.

Medical Billing Dashboard - Nine Performance Indicators for Transparent and Accountable Outsourcing
Arcane terminology and complex rules for payer- and time-dependent claim validity and pricing interpretation plague medical billing industry, resulting in massive payments of invalid or ineligible claims and denials of error-free claims. Billing service transparency allows participants of the billing process to expedite error identification and resolution, resulting in reduced over- and under-payments and improved regulatory compliance.

Five Steps to Medical Billing Lockbox Selection
Lockbox services add revenue, lower administrative costs, and expedite revenue cycles. A wide range of issues complicate lockbox implementation including HIPAA compliance, quality assurance, user and system interfaces, and carefull planning. Disciplined lockbox outsourcing to a qualified billing service or a specialized financial institution lightens implementation complexities and expedites deployment.

Top Five Keys to Solving Physician Interface Dilemma in Medical Billing and EMR Systems
Integrated billing and EMR systems consolidate patient's personal, administrative, and health care information. An immediate data aggregation at the point of care elevates its benefit from plain recording of patient encounter to useful decision support system, but it is only possible with timely input of compliant medical notes. Powerful Vericle-like technologies facilitate combined transcription with rapidly customizable point-and-click templates, optimizing physician's interface to EMR, providing added degree of regulatory compliance, and reducing post-payment audit risk.

Chiropractic Billing and Patient Relationship Management
Return patients generate approximately 80 percent of clinic's revenue. Patient Relationship Management (PRM, also known as CRM, for Customer Relationship Management outside of healthcare) can enhance financial performance of the clinic by helping retain current and attract new patients. Effective PRM uses integrated data using patient travel card (SOAP notes), frequency recommendations (care plan), and billing (charges, payments, and balance).

Chiropractic Billing Audit Risk Webinar
Dr. Ben Lerner, founder of Teach The World About Chiropractic and author of "One Minute Wellness," discovered a convenient way to educate thousands of chiropractors about coding compliance and audit risk reduction. "Compliance maintenance requires special skills and military discipline," says Dr. Lerner. "Webinars are ideal for audit risk management instruction because they deliver urgently needed education but require minimal investment in terms of time and cost."

Medical Billing Audit Risk Webinar - How to Hang Onto Your Money
Doctors and practice managers are looking for cost-effective and productive ways to learn better ways to manage their practice and revenue cycle. Increasing frequency of post-payment insurance audits and mounting severity of penalties, ranging from license suspension to heavy monetary fines, emphasize the need for effective and affordable education about compliant office management and audit risks. The key benefit of the webinar is its convenience - there is no travel required and important information is delivered in ninety-minute sessions that make it easy for even the busiest doctors to quickly gain important information on topics ranging from successfully implementing EMR systems, to understanding the real benefits and challenges of outsourced billing services, risk management of post-payment audits, and much more. Historically, live webinars attract 10 to 300 participants and dozens more access the archives.

Medical Billing Performance Index - July 2006
July Billing Precision Index outperformed June value by 20%, replacing five participants in the list of top ten performers and bringing the index from 18 down to 15. This article reports a second iteration of a prototype for a rule-based chiropractic index, including its coverage definition, update cycle, volume weighting, and provided information.

Medical Billing Products in Press (June - July 2006)
Medical Billing technology has witnessed continued expansion during the first two months of this summer, as evidenced by press releases about some ninety products accumulated in BillingWiki. A practice manager may find it difficult to select the best product from such a large product variety. This article roughly tabulates some eighty-five press releases about medical billing technology products and/or vendors across two-dozen service categories.

Medical Billing, HIPAA Compliance, and Role Based Access Control
HIPAA compliance requires special focus and effort as failure to comply carries significant risk of damage and penalties. A practice with multiple separate systems for patient scheduling, electronic medical records, and billing, requires multiple separate HIPAA management efforts. This article presents an integrated approach to HIPAA compliance and outlines key HIPAA terminology, principles, and requirements to help the practice owner to ensure HIPAA compliance by medical billing service and software vendors.

Medical Billing Knowledge Management with Communal Documentation and Adaptive Search
Google became a standard reference tool for almost every group of age and interest. But Google frustrates doctors looking for better understanding of medical billing complexities and modern straight through billing technologies. This article briefly explores the contradictory forces of the most popular search algorithm on the planet and outlines specialized, collaborative, and self-learning technologies to solve its limitations in the context of medical billing and compliance.

Medical Billing OLAP for Lost Revenue Discovery
Average medical practice may lose as much as 11% of its revenue due to underpayments. But underpayment recovery potential averages only 5% of revenue and involves costly appeal process. To avoid unrecoverable losses, some providers discontinue servicing patients insured by the worst performing payers. Unfortunately, such a drastic loss reduction measure may boomerang and increase losses depending on complexity of referral relationships. This article outlines limitations of traditional database queries used to identify payer candidates for contract termination and demonstrates alternative decision choices with superior performance in terms of revenue and risk management, facilitated with On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) technology.

Medical Billing Process Problem Tracking
Processes involving large volumes of complex billing transactions require effective mechanisms for problem assignment and tracking. Without such mechanisms, billing personnel cannot be held accountable for problem resolution, resulting in loss of revenue and increased compliance risk. While medical billing industry has developed specialized systems and processes for resolution of content problems, little attention has been paid to billing process problem resolution methodology. This article outlines a process and a technology for integrated billing process problem resolution methodology.

Straight Through Billing Methodology for Medical Practice
Medical billing complexity and massive volumes of daily claims render manual claims processes incapable of protecting both the provider and the payer from underpayments, overpayments, and billing compliance violations. Straight Through Billing addresses complexity and volume processing problems by automating the majority of the claim flow and focusing the billing follow-up specialists to exceptions only. A Straight Through Billing process flags problems, routes them for follow up, and enables online correction and resubmission. Straight Through Billing methodology implements billing service transparency and focuses management on strategic process improvement opportunities.

Medical Billing Transparency
Medical billing industry has volumes of arcane terminology and payer- and time-dependent claim validity and pricing interpretation rules, facilitating massive payments of invalid or ineligible claims and denials of error-free claims. Process transparency provides its participants greater visibility of internal process activities. An increased level of access promotes teamwork, increases client satisfaction, and assists in process streamlining.

Medical Billing Performance Index
Benchmark-driven performance management helps establish objective industry standards. Medical service providers can use benchmarking to evaluate performance of their billing service and measure their improvement over time. This article presents a prototype for a rule-based chiropractic index, including its coverage definition, update cycle, volume weighting, and provided information.

Medical Practice Software as a Service (SaaS)
Software as a Service (SaaS) is the new generation of ASP model designed to reduce the exorbitant costs of specialized medical practice management software. SaaS model is available for all aspects of medical practice management, including scheduling, billing, and electronic medical records (EMR), which are mission-critical for high quality clinical service, business operations, and regulatory compliance. SaaS model extends the advantages of Application Service Provider (ASP) model, which in turn evolves from the traditional Client-Server model. This article briefly defines key concepts and outlines a set of guidelines for SaaS vendor selection.

Medical Billing Service Selection Process
Over four thousand vendors of medical billing services offer solutions to medical practices nationwide in response to poor in-house billing performance and increasing regulatory scrutiny of billing processes. On one hand, such a large number of outsourced billing solutions ensure continued competitiveness in terms of both service quality and pricing. On the other hand, the lack of uniform service standards and metrics among the vendors, combined with their large numbers, makes the process of vendor selection difficult and error-prone. While the availability of a large vendor selection allows finding an alternative to unsatisfactory service, billing vendor-switching costs remain high, motivating extra effort and focus during the stage of vendor selection. This article outlines basic thirteen-step guidelines for an effective and efficient medical billing vendor selection process.

Medical Billing Control with Computer Aided Coding
The average practice submits half of its codes wrong, while some practices rarely exceed more than one code right out of every five codes. Inexact and inconsistent coding increases the risks of undercharging, overcharging, and post-payment audit. Computer aided coding with integrated superbill completes the transformation of coding from individualistic art towards disciplined and systematic process.

Medical Billing Underpayment Risk Management
Average medical practice may lose as much as 11% of its revenue due to underpayments. Underpayment identification is difficult because an underpaid claim falls outside the domain of clearly identifiable claims that are fully paid or denied. The degree of underpayment adds further complexity to and exacerbates the difficulty of underpayment identification. Upon defining claim underpayment concept in more precise terms, this article roughly estimates recovery potential at 5% of monthly claims volume. Quantification of recovery potential drives the design of a disciplined three-stage underpayment avoidance and recovery process.

Medical Billing Performance Improvements with Computer Aided Preferential Patient Scheduling
Without a computerized scheduler, a practice has less than 2% chance to earn the title of a “better performing practice,” according to Medical Group Management Association. Convenience and front office efficiencies are two obvious benefits of a computerized scheduling system, since without it, the only manual way to find out if a specific patient has a scheduled appointment is to flip through the appointment book page by page. But the benefits of integrated computerized scheduling stretch far beyond convenience, front office efficiencies, and better charge followup of a stand-alone, albeit computerized, scheduling. A well-designed and integrated scheduler allows preferential patient scheduling, which, along with improved controls, helps revenue optimization and practice compliance.

Medical Billing Audit, Fraud Detection, and Overpayment Recovery
Mistaken payments add up to an estimated $200 billion, more than 10% of national healthcare costs. Insurance profitability experts believe that a payment scrutiny program can be as successful a profit-building strategy for insurance companies as raising premiums or adding members. However, avoiding mistaken payments is hard because of the volume of claims, the disparate and disconnected sources of relevant information, the resource-intensive manual processes needed to identify and investigate recovery opportunities, and regulatory requirements for timely payments. A full-scale payment scrutiny strategy implementation requires sophisticated processes to handle prepayment claim review and post-payment audits and uses advanced fraud detection technology similar to credit card fraud detection.

Medical Billing Performance Metrics
Billing performance measurement is an integral part of medical practice billing process and a prerequisite to effective practice management. Systematic measurement becomes mission-critical with growth of billing complexity or outsourcing of the billing function. Traditional billing metrics are limited in scope and focus on claim submission process, ignoring process imperfections on the insurance (payer) side. Modern computer technologies allow both productive measurement and effective action by the disciplined billing office to improve claim submission and payment processes.

Medical Billing Workflow Management
The reduction of accounts receivable is key responsibility of billing function in a medical practice. This article compares traditional (distributed) billing function with centralized workflow management. It shows that centralized workflow management yields significant advantages over the distributed approach in terms of the ability to manage accounts receivable. However, it also requires significant investment in process, technology, and personnel training.

Medical Billing Compliance in Chiropractic Office
According to BillingWiki, thirteen articles and news items were published on the topic of medical billing fraud, during May of 2006. An environment of high volume of patient encounters creates thousands of possibilities to deviate from normal distribution of services and trigger an audit. Real time analysis requires powerful technology infrastructure and competent legal coverage. Such infrastructure must handle all compliance aspects together, which necessitates modern Vericle-type integrative approach, combining billing, monitoring, and medical record management components in a single and comprehensive system.

Medical Practice Technology - Client-Server Versus Application Service Provider (ASP)
Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and digital billing systems offer substantial clinical care, financial, practice workflow, and compliance benefits to doctors, insurance companies, and patients. On the other hand, half of medical practices that purchase EMR software fail to successfully implement it. Upon briefly reviewing key factors defining each technology, we compare them along two criteria, namely implementation success likelihood and costs.

Medical Billing Outsourcing Dilemma
Can an outsourced medical billing service improve or expedite payments and reduce costs? This article revisits key arguments for and against billing outsourcing in light of increasing complexity and regulatory scrutiny of billing processes.

Medical Billing Price-Performance and Relative Value of Billing Quality
Internet-based technology has been applied effectively to reduce medical billing costs, especially at the stages of electronic submission and scrubbing. However, an excess focus on reducing the costs of individual process components at the expense of the bottom-line exposes the medical practice to significant financial downside and inferior billing performance. An alternative bottom-line driven approach shows a more comprehensive financial picture and better reflects the overall costs of billing. The bottom-line approach results in substantially higher remittance and better regulatory compliance. It is effective, however, only subject to billing performance guarantees and transparency.

Medical Billing Knowledge Sharing for Improved Compliance, Performance, and Coding
A new industry of high-technology medical billing has mushroomed under the auspices of its promise to streamline the collections process and leave doctors with more time to care for their patients. Though many high-quality services and systems exist, an overwhelming variety of options and attractive (yet unsubstantiated) performance claims from some providers have charmed busy doctors into making poor strategic decisions for their practices. Collaborative billing knowledge base improves medical practice profitability and compliance.

ABOUT BILLING DEPOT
Billing Depot, Inc. is a national Third Party Billing Service, Certified by the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance. Headquartered in East Windsor, New Jersey, it guarantees improved profitability and 100% transparency throughout the billing process. The service uniquely leverages comprehensive practice workflow technology, including patient scheduling, SOAP notes, Electronic Medical Records (EMR), electronic claim submission, followup, and 24x7 online financial reporting.

CONTACT INFORMATION
Pat Freeze, President
Billing Depot
(877) 542-4557
http://www.billingdepot.com
pat.freeze@billingdepot.com

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