Back to School – 5 Quick Tips so Billing Doesn’t Slip

About Amanda

Amanda Whitener has extensive revenue cycle expertise dating back nearly a decade ranging from ambulatory surgery centers to optometry. As VisionWeb's RCM Account Manager, she focuses on helping ODs experience financial freedom by ensuring claims are worked quickly and correctly as she has robust knowledge of operations for various areas of the practice. Currently, Amanda's primary role is helping offices reduce billing burden and labor costs while maximizing cash coming through the door. 

Stay Ahead of the Back-to-School Rush: 5 Billing Tips to Keep Your Practice on Track

It’s that time again! With back to school coming up, it’s imperative to stay on top of billing to prevent your practice from playing catch up with your claims. Outlined below are a few tips to ensure proper planning and solid checks and balances are established before falling behind with cash.

1. Use Reporting – Find the report that your particular PM uses to capture invoices that were created but not billed. This report should be run consistently throughout the month to ensure all claims are being sent to the payers in a timely fashion. Find a cadence that works for your practice.
   
   
2. Hold the Billing Team Accountable – Asking your biller to give you a regular update on the rejections and denials they’ve worked can ensure that they are, in fact, being worked. Keep in mind that in both rejections and denials the payer is telling the practice what is wrong with the claim. It could be that the biller simply needs to change an “0” in the patient’s ID to a “O”. If this isn’t worked timely, the practice could lose out on the cash it already worked so hard to collect simply due to a typo.
   
   
3. Use EFTs – Make sure that any payer that can pay by EFT is set up to do so for your practice. Waiting for a paper check takes too much time and can likely end up in a pile on someone’s desk waiting for them to get the time to post them. If payments are not posted, your office might try to work it as false AR, wasting valuable time. Additionally, if the ledger isn’t reconciled then there is delay time in the patient getting any statement due to them.
   
   
4. Check into Auto Posting – Auto posting is available in many PMs. This feature takes quite a bit of the manual labor out of payment posting so it can be much less time consuming.
   
   
5. Collect Upfront from Patients – Due to staff being busy, there may be a lag time in sending statements to patients. That said, collecting upfront can help mitigate the statements needing to be sent in the first place.

Don’t stop there! These are just a few of the many tips and tricks to follow when trying to make it through the busy season unscathed. Start planning early and watch the practice move through the busy season much more efficiently!