Physician's Practice - November 2008 - (Page 28)

BILLING COMPUTERIZE YOUR PREVISIT HOMEWORK You’ve heard this advice before: To ensure a clean claim, collect the patient’s demographic and insurance information before the visit. Practices have traditionally done that over the phone or by mailing patients the usual registration forms for them to complete and return. To take this advice up one notch, post those forms on your practice Web site, assuming you have one (and you should). Patients can print out and complete the forms and then mail or fax them in advance of their visit. Better yet, enable your Web site to allow patients to complete the forms and transmit them to you electronically (using encryption). Or use waiting-room kiosks to capture the information, rather than handing patients a stack of forms and a pen. Handwritten forms are sometimes illegible, causing staffers to enter inaccurate data that leads to claim denials. At four-physician Northern Virginia Family Practice Associates in Alexandria, almost 100 percent of new patients register online. “Our errors have gone down and our revenue has gone up” since the practice made the switch, says administrator Mary Dooher. has installed kiosks in half of its waiting rooms. And make sure you’re capturing all the information you need, including patients’ cell phone numbers, says practice management consultant Deborah Walker Keegan. After all, almost 70 percents of adults polled online recently by Harris Interactive reported that they have both a cell and a land line. (Some have only cell phones.) “If you can’t reach them about a past-due balance NO INCOMPLETES IN SUMMARY Mulish third-party payers and cash-strapped patients force practices to be Olympic medalists when it comes to billing and collections. To go from bronze to gold, consider the following: You can structure electronic registrations forms so the patient can’t proceed unless he fills in all the blanks. “Patients will skip half the questions if you let them.” Beth McGinnis, Iowa Clinic • Registration: Have patients complete their forms online before the visit to save you work and reduce errors. • Inpatient charges: Generate rounding lists, utilize charge-capture software on mobile devices, and check physician progress notes for tests and procedures that may be missing on charge tickets. • Coding: Decrease coders’ data-entry duties and assign them more challenging work like contract review and insurance appeals. • Claims scrubbing: Have a system • Insurance A/R follow-up: When in place to correct suspended claims and send them out the door pronto. assigning billers to third-party payers, take into account how much work each payer represents. • Patient collections: Allow patients to pay online or at a waiting-room kiosk. Their competition to outdo each other will boost your bottom line. • Collection agencies: Use two of them. Employees type in the online data just as they would working with a hard copy. What’s more efﬁcient is a Web site that sends registration information straight into your practice management system without rekeying (although you should review it beforehand for accuracy). The major physician connectivity companies — Medfusion, Medem, and RelayHealth — offer such software integration. Another advantage of computerized registration — whether it’s done on a practice Web site or a waiting-room kiosk — is that you can structure the form so the patient can’t proceed unless he fills in all the blanks. “Patients will skip half the questions if you let them,” says Beth McGinnis, the billing and IT manager for the 120-doctor Iowa Clinic in Des Moines, which on the land line, try the cell,” says Keegan, coauthor of “The Physician Billing Process.” Also, you can contact patients during their 9-to-5 jobs on their cells instead of waiting to call their landlines at night, although Keegan suggests getting their approval beforehand to ring their cell. CLEAN UP YOUR HOSPITAL ACT Experts say that many practices that earn an A for capturing all their charges in the ofﬁce are D students when it comes to inpatient charges. It’s not surprising. On the run in a hectic environment and deprived of their usual coding tools, doctors fall into bad habits. “They’re notorious for writing hospital charges on napkins and turning them in late,” says practice management consultant Greg Mertz. So if you want to raise WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM 28 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | NOVEMBER 2008 http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Physician's Practice - November 2008

Physician's Practice - November 2008 Contents Death of Solo Practice Just a Myth Letters HSAy What? Noteworthy Finding Lost Revenue: The Search for Billing and Coding Gold Getting More: Our Annual Physician Compensation Survey ’Tis the Season to be Neutral Ask the Experts Evaluating Paperless Labs HR in a Box? The Guide Coding Third-Party Audits on the Rise Branding the Cash-Only Practice Intra-Office Tug-of-Wars Stickin‘ Up For Yourself Classifieds Advertiser Index

Physician's Practice - November 2008

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