Medical Billing Blog: Section - Denials
Archive of all Articles in the Denials Section
This is the archive containing links to all articles written in the Denials section of our blog.
Click any of the article links below to read the entire article or browse another section to the right to read articles on another subject.
Tips for Working the Reports on Your Aging Healthcare Claims
Claims aging reports are crucial tools in the healthcare industry. They provide a snapshot of outstanding claims and help healthcare providers manage their accounts receivable effectively. Proper management of these reports can significantly improve cash flow, reduce the risk of bad debt, and enhance the overall financial health of a healthcare organization. This article will offer comprehensive tips for working with aging reports for healthcare claims, ensuring that healthcare providers can maximize their revenue cycle efficiency. Understanding Aging Reports What is an Aging Report? An aging report, also known as an accounts receivable (AR) aging report, is a summary of outstanding invoices that a healthcare provider has billed to patients …
The Importance of Denial Management in Healthcare Revenue Cycle
The healthcare revenue cycle is a complex, multifaceted process that encompasses everything from patient registration and service provision to billing and collections. A critical, though often underappreciated, component of this cycle is denial management. Given its direct impact on an organization’s financial health, understanding, and effectively managing denials is paramount for healthcare providers. Denial management refers to the process of investigating, appealing, and mitigating payment denials by insurance companies. It’s a pivotal part of revenue cycle management (RCM) that ensures healthcare providers are compensated for the services they deliver. However, despite its importance, many organizations face challenges in effectively managing denials, leading to significant revenue loss and operational inefficiencies. This …
Defining the Role of a Medical Billing Clearing House
The importance of a clearing house in the medical world cannot be overemphasized. Also called Third Party Administrators (TPAs), clearing houses make healthcare payment seamless by serving as a link between the hospital, patient, and insurance provider. The role of the clearing house is to interact with the billing system of a hospital, clinic or physician’s office to evaluate medical claims. It sets up necessary documents for patients with claims before forwarding them to the insurer. Typically, a clearing house has strong ties with various insurance providers. Clearing houses aren’t restricted to just collecting documents and ensuring proper documentation for the claim/claims of patients, they are also saddled with the …
The Importance of A/R and Outstanding Medical Claims
Accounts receivable (A/R) management is an integral part of the medical billing process and it is crucial for the financial stability and success of healthcare facilities and medical practitioners. Accounts receivable is referred to as the sum of money owed to the medical practitioner or healthcare provider for the service provided, but not yet paid. The medical services that are rendered by physicians, nursing homes, therapists, laboratory technicians, and hospitals are continuously increasing. An efficient insurance model assists a medical practice in recovering overdue payments from insurance carriers easily and on time. This is when a diligent A/R employee, or department is important, they assist the healthcare provider in being …
Medical Billing vs Medical Coding, What’s the Difference?
Medical coding and medical billing are two of the reimbursement systems within the healthcare organization. The professionals who perform these tasks are known as medical coders and medical billers, respectively. The work of medical coders and medical billers is to analyze medical treatments received by patients while at a healthcare facility to coordinate payments from insurance companies and patients. In this article, we will discuss the difference between medical coding and medical billing. However, it is important to have a brief understanding of what medical coding and medical billing entail. What is Medical Coding? Medical coding is a way of converting healthcare diagnosis, procedures, medical services, and equipment into universal …
RCM tip: Use an automated solution to tackle claim denials
As healthcare organizations continue to struggle with claim denials, an automated solution can help limit the issue, according to Kevin Lathrop, president of TriZetto Provider Solutions, a Cognizant company. Mr. Lathrop shared the following tip with Becker’s Hospital Review. “One way to keep denials from happening in the future is by stepping away from the manual processing that takes place at a computer terminal, and replacing it with an automated claims and denials system. An automated system has the benefit of knowing payer codes. Treatment codes change over time and must be kept up-to-date. Keeping track of them by hand is difficult and time-consuming, but an automated solution has the …
7 strategies to prevent claims denials
Claims denials pose a serious issue for hospitals amid an already complicated reimbursement landscape. “Denials are a huge obstacle to timely and complete reimbursement,” said Carmen Sessoms, associate vice president of the revenue cycle management advisory services program at Nashville, Tenn.-based Change Healthcare. In 2016, Change Healthcare managed 1.8 billion transactions with a value of more than $3 trillion. Leveraging this data, analysts determined approximately 9 percent of claims with a value of $262 billion were denied. These denials impacted about 3.3 percent of net patient revenue, translating to an average of $4.9 million per hospital. Denials are not only highly prevalent in the healthcare environment, but also very costly …
Outsourcing a Dirty Word toYou?
The word “outsourcing” has become a dirty word for many physicians that have been burned by medical billing companies that either outsourced their claims to medical billing companies that use neither secure networks nor adhere to HIPAA regulation in order to maximize their profits; or the outsourcing company just turned out to not be reliable and it wound up costing the practice money to utilize their services. Don’t let a bad experience keep you from partnering with a legitimate medical billing company that can not only help you get your reimbursements faster but also realize great profits by maximizing every single medical billing claim that is filed to make sure …
October Updates Are In Effect!
If you haven’t already, make sure that your staff is using the updated CPT codes that were released in October 2008. Not doing so can lead to kick backs that will require more staff hours to research, redo and resubmit and if this happens on a number of claims it can seriously affect your reimbursements and in turn – slow your revenue flow to a mere trickle. One way to avoid this dilemma is to outsource your medical billing and yes, there are some horror stories out there about outsource companies that threw away patient billing, had lax attitudes towards billing submissions and wound up costing the physician a lot …
Tips for Getting Maximum Reimbursements for Ulcer Claims
Often, patients who are confined to beds for long periods of time develop pressure ulcers. They are painful and need to be treated as quickly as possible as infections can set up within them that can be life threatening when the patient is already in a weakened condition. When a service is performed for a patient such as treatment of a pressure ulcer on an area of the body such as the lower back, the usual manner of treatment is to remove any devitalized tissue from the ulcer using a water jet and forceps. The area is then covered to allow it to not be rubbed on so the skin …
