When Was The Last Time You Had A Medical Billing Audit?

By Mindy Jackson


Physicians often fail to look at their own coding because they are so busy dealing with patients and medicine. They fail to get together with their medical billers in order to ensure proper procedures. However, this will prove to be a costly mistake later on. If a medical billing has incorrect information in it, the bill often does not get paid on. It goes into the rejected claims pile. If your medical coder forgets all about it, you will not receive money on it. You would be surprised that many of these bills are for $1,000.00 or more and yet it goes into the "I will do it later" pile.

Doctors today are losing patients because of incorrect billing and poor billing audits. If insurance companies don't care to report why a claim is not being paid and how it can be fixed, a physician loses thousands of dollars. Today, physicians often feel that they are at war with insurance companies. Can you imagine performing a surgery and the insurance company saying that they are not going to pay you for it? It is like buying a house with no money being involved. You built the house and now deserved to get paid for your services rendered. However, doctors are experiencing denied claims.

A lot of doctors blame the software that they are using as being the problem. However, in most cases, it is not the software. If it is designed to be used for ICD-10 coding, it is most often the medical coders fault. Believe it or not, most medical coders today are not qualified enough to get your good returns on your claims. It is estimated that 17% of all coders are not skilled enough to handle ICD-10. This is a large percentage of coders in the world today.

The United States has a large amount of an aging population. Many people are simply living longer and require more healthcare. In 2005, there was a 7% increase in healthcare costs. In 2015, this costs rose even more to 4 trillion dollars. Insurance alone costs the US government billions of dollars each year. It is expected that healthcare costs will only rise. In order to make sure that your claims get paid, you need to have your own internal medical billing audits. It is important that you do this at least once a month to go over any bills that you may have missed. If a claim was rejected, was it sent back corrected or is it still laying around in the office somewhere?

Internal audits help the healthcare company to see that they can benefit from the new ICD-10 codes. It should not feel like a nightmare every single time that you mail out your claim. If you have someone that works well with you, then it shouldn't be a problem. It is estimated that 17% of all coders today are not qualified enough to do your billing. It can feel like a nightmare. It can be a completely bad situation that doesn't work well. Getting an outsourced company to do your billing often works best for doctors that want to focus more on their patients and less on their billing.




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