Sophisticating Your Medical Billing Process: Essential Steps

We all understand that as a healthcare professional, you are incredibly devoted to offering best services to your patients. But being practical, you should also be extra attentive toward your financial management and operations. You should also be highly curious about your revenue cycle management as all you do is for business and revenue generation. 

Initially, the process starts, when the patient visits a healthcare facility either personally or through telemedicine or remote appointment. The process ends when payment is done after taking services. All this will contain communication between the patient and healthcare facility, their staff, and the health insurers. 

Sometimes, it can be quite complex if you have just begun the practice. If you will smartly follow every step of the medical billing process, you will be able to eliminate challenges, cut down on errors, and will receive payment for your services on time. 

10 crucial steps in medical billing process

Proper medical registration

No matter if the patient is visiting you for the first time or they have been visiting for decades. Every time they visit, some sort of registration formality should be there. A complete medical history, demographic and other details should be taken at the very first digit.

Take note of insurance and financial responsibility

As soon as the patient visit and registration start, make sure you confirm if the patient is having any insurance coverage. Depending on the visit, also confirm if there is anything secondary that needs to be billed. This way, you can verify the current insurance coverage details and eliminate delays in payment. 

Take all the patient information during visits

Make sure you are noting down all the information related to patients during visits. You can even record the visit and meeting for double check. This is because all the crucial information needs to be delivered to the medical coder for better coding. 

Transferring patient information to billing team

The medical script after the patient visit is then filtered and shared with the medical billing team. If you are having your in-house team of billing, then you can send the records to staff and they can transcribe them. The transcribe should be error-free if you have a partnership with medical coding and billing services providers. 

After sending the information to the billing team, the next steps include applying CPT codes appropriately, charge entry, insurance adjudication, preparing the patient statement, and lastly patient follow-up and payment. 

Although every step is important for a medical facility, getting the payments for services is what generates revenue and keeps the joy on. You may have to give a certain amount of time to your patients. Furthermore, you also have to offer various payment methods like debit cards, credit cards, cheques, and digital payments also. With this, several options will be there for patients. Although the worst scenario is you may have to use a collection strategy to obtain your payments. 

If you are encountering troubles in medical billing processes, VLMS Global Healthcare can be your support system.