In order to increase the profitability of your medical lab_ you need more than the knowledge and experience of carrying the tasks of a lab technician. Optimized independent laboratory billing services can help you grow more opportunities for your business than inefficient healthcare revenue cycle management.
But how could you ensure the efficiency of your medical billing and coding system to meet your business objectives? In this article, I have compiled the most effective strategies that can optimize medical billing systems so you can proceed with your administrative tasks more efficiently and bring increased revenue for your business.
Following are the most advanced billing solutions for your independent lab;
- Integrate EHR/ EMR:
It’s an old school to manage all your documentation on the papers. Therefore, you don’t need to rely on the old and inefficient manual system. Collect your patient’s information from the automatic solutions and manage it on cloud-based solutions for EHR and EMR.
So whenever needed, patients can also update their information from online portals. Also, lab technicians can follow-up with the latest information and closely monitor real-time changes in the patient’s healthcare data.
In this way, lab technicians would never rely on outdated information and prepare medical billing claims by using the right data. With 100% accurate information, medical claims would also get reimbursed easily.
Therefore using automatic solutions to collect patient information is the most critical solution to ensure the efficiency of independent laboratory billing services.
- Hire Professional Medical Billers:
It’s been observed that most of the lab technicians don’t focus primarily on hiring certified and professional medical billers. Although, it was quite effective in the past when the medical billing and coding system wasn’t that much complicated to hire anybody from the data entry level to perform medical billing.
However, these days, when the billing and the coding environment have become highly complex due to multiple federal regulations, insurance policies and patient demands, practitioners should not take such kind of risk.
Rather than previous norms of the industry, practitioners should hire highly qualified specialists for independent laboratory billing services. If you own a well-established laboratory then you can also think of hiring a medical billing company who’d offer you services and dedicated resources according to your business size.
It seems like that the latter solution is more proficient for your organization because you would get stress-free from hiring, recruiting and training employees in your office premises. While a professional medical billing company would be handling your accounts and keep you up-to-date with your financial progress.
- Ensure Compliance:
This is the most inevitable phenomenon of the medical field that you have to comply with all the federal regulations in order to keep running your medical lab for long.
In this regard, practitioners should make sure that their billing staff is considering the unique requirements of individual insurance payers. Also, billing specialists should make sure to utilize the patient’s confidential healthcare information in compliance with the policy of HIPAA act.
If lab technicians would manage every aspect of their business according to the standards, rules and policies of the legislative bodies.
- Engage Your Patients:
When it comes to the situation when you have to inform the financial responsibilities to the patients.
Then it is essential that your medical billing staff has enough expertise to prepare easily comprehensible patient bills. So your patients can immediately understand what they have to pay. For this purpose, medical billers and coders should use smart strategies so they won’t fill medical claims with complicated coding jargon and make it more understandable for non-medical people.
In this way, patients would get informed of their financial responsibilities and they’d become better able to pay their dues quickly. Hence, you’d get rid of aging account receivables and maximize your collections with innovative solutions.
- Stay Up-To-Date With Coding Standards:
As mentioned earlier, the medical coding system is highly complicated; but have you wondered why is that so?
Simply, the medical coding keeps changing with the passage of time. You can’t guess the time of year when authorities can update, delete or modify anything in the medical codebook.
Therefore, you need smart solutions for independent laboratory billing services, so that you can stay up-to-date with the latest set of medical codes. Because your medical billing staff would prepare and submit claims with outdated medical codes mentioned on them.
Then the payers would definitely reject or deny such claims and your revenue will slip through the cracks due to these mistakes. In order to prevent your practice from any kind of revenue loss, it is essential to also ensure compliance with the latest medical coding trends for every disease.
Now you’ve got the idea that when you think of the administrative aspects of your healthcare business then it is completely a different but important component of your medical lab. Therefore, you should also focus on bringing on smart solutions for medical billing and coding systems.
Want to scale up the revenue margins for your independent lab? Medcare MSO is here to offer you a highly transparent and completely customized solution for your revenue cycle management.
Barry Lachey is a Professional Editor at Zobuz. Previously He has also worked for Moxly Sports and Network Resources “Joe Joe.” he is a graduate of the Kings College at the University of Thames Valley London. You can reach Barry via email or by phone.
