Three Oncology Medical Billing Tips to Improve Patient Collections
One of the essential key components of effective revenue cycle management is improving patient collections. Over the past few years, due to a pandemic in the healthcare industry, medical payments have undergone drastic challenges due to expensive oncology medical billing and an increase in healthcare costs. The increase in deductibles and copayments resulted in higher medical bills that many patients face difficulty in paying.
To avoid cash flow target issues, healthcare service providers must adjust their collections to reflect the new demands of the medical industry. However, healthcare service providers give high priority to improving the success rate in collecting these medical bills.
A lot of things can go wrong in the medical billing process, but if you adhere to changes in ICD-10 and establish a standardized medical billing process with clean claims you can surely maximize patient collections. You can conduct the billing process by yourself in-house or you can outsource billing procedures to a reliable and expert medical billing company.
If you want to handle the billing process in-house, here are the best oncology medical billing tips that help you a lot to maximize your collection rate and get every dollar owed to you for each medical service provided.
- Accurately collect patient contact and insurance information
Your front-end staff is responsible for collecting accurate and complete information from the patients. Which include home address, multiple phone number, ID card number, full name, birth date, and insurance details. However, instead of asking for all the information from the patient on the spot, you can request the patient to email their complete details. It will help to reduce mistakes that happen most of the time due to lack of time and performing other duties at the same time.
If you are using online appointment scheduling tools or patient portal tools then make sure that they have the necessary field to update and collect patient information. When you collect contact information from patients make sure that it is up-to-date and accurate. Because ensuring accurate patient records leads to minimize errors and maximize collections. You can also use claim scrubbing tools to automatically check on common mistakes.
2. Offer Payment plans
If you want to improve your oncology medical billing services, offering multiple and convenient payment options is one of the best strategies. Because due to growing patient financial responsibility, the need for convenient payment options is imperative. It will help improve patient satisfaction and maximize patient collections.
However, an easy-to-use online payment tool in your patient portal can also facilitate patient payments. You can also collect payment upfront because the best time to pay is upon the appointment day while the patient is in your hospital.
If you are relying on paper claim processing systems and receiving checks in the mail for your collections, it will result in a wastage of time in sending mail, delay in payments, and an increase in accounts receivable. However, if you let patients pay via your patient portal it makes the payment process as easy as possible.
3. Use the Latest Technology
We all know that oncology medical billing is a complicated and time-taking task that requires accuracy. The more you rely on the latest technology the more you get accurate results, that save time and improve staff’s efficiency. Advanced billing tools can streamline your patient collections process by automating late fees, tracking past dues, and identifying patients who are behind. It will also save you a significant amount of internal billing resources and optimize your payment collection rate.
Nearly 80 percent of medical bills contain medical billing and coding errors that negatively impact a practice’s revenue and your medical staff’s efficiency because an inaccurate bill maximizes the likelihood of a denial claim. Resubmitting the denial claim can waste staff efforts, time, and leaves medical healthcare providers waiting for payment. Automatic medical billing solutions prevent manual errors and alleviating the administrative burden of processing billing paperwork. The optimized process then allows practitioners to reallocate medical staff to more patient-centric roles.
Key Takeaways:
All the above-mentioned strategies help healthcare practices to improve patient care. If you feel any difficulty in collecting payment in-house or your practice still facing revenue leakage due to high account receivable and denials, you can outsource oncology medical billing services to a professional billing company like Medcare MSO. We offer cost-effective solutions that focus on essential billing services, including certified medical coding, insurance verification, regular follow-up, denial management, auditing, reporting, and advanced solutions to protect your revenue to improve patient collection.
