Undercoding Your Medical Billing Can Cost Your Practice

A well-known secret in the medical billing industry is that many physicians purposefully undercode because they are fearful of the penalties for overcoding or unbundling their medical billing claims. Another big mistake some physicians make is to leave their coding to their staff, which is guaranteed to have errors because the staff has no way of knowing exactly which services occurred in the exam room and which did not.

In capitated care issues, physicians who don’t code for supplies reimbursement on their medical billing claims lose a lot of money. Imagine if every patient that you provided services to was worth an extra $50, imagine how that revenue would add up if your medical billing were coded correctly. Worse, elective services and carve outs are miscoded and that causes the services to be bundled into the capitation rate which results in a lowered reimbursement rate for the physician.

A recent statistic said all practices that do their own medical billing are losing about $10,000 per year on the average simply from undercoding on their medical billing claims, not to mention losses to due to bad coding, denials and other issues that can be resolved by outsourcing your medical billing.

If you have only been thinking about outsourcing your medical billing, look into it today, you can save your practice a lot of money and streamline your claims submission process and realize a greater profit and constant revenue flow for your practice. Not only that, your medical billing partner will consult with your staff and show them faster ways of doing your coding that will result in a greater number of claims paid and less time spent on paperwork.

View all Articles by: Melissa Clark, CCS-P