Practice Management Alert

You might also consider reassigning current staff to fill vacancies

If you-re looking for a great way to check the qualifications of a billing applicant, administer a billing and collections quiz to see how they would handle issues they would have to deal with on the job.
 
For a related article on quizzing billing applicants, see -Reader Question: It's True: Some Interviewees- Skills Are False Gold- in the October issue of Medical Office Billing & Collections Alert.

Consider these exercises, courtesy of Elizabeth Woodcock, speaker and coauthor of -The Physician Billing Process: Potholes in the Road to Getting Paid.-

Blank account history: -Give the candidate an account history and patient balance (blacking out the private information, of course), and ask how she would work the account, Woodcock says.

In other words, ask the applicant how she would go about obtaining payment from the patient, says Catherine Brink, CMM, CPC, president of Health Care Resource Management Inc. in Spring Lake, N.J.

When the applicant works an account, you can see -how the interviewee would go about obtaining payment, and how she-d deal with the patient,- Brink says.

Handling denials: Woodcock says another good test for interviewees is to give the candidate an explanation of benefits (EOB) with a denial common for your practice.  -Ask the candidate to describe what is going on--and what action steps they would take- to handle the denial, she says.

For example, you might see how a candidate would handle a level-four new patient evaluation and management service EOB that the insurer denied due to lack of medical necessity, Woodcock says.

Check Staff Structure Before Hiring

If a position does open up in your billing office, check your own office for potential candidates, because it may be easier to -promote from within- for the billing position, Woodcock says.

-When you have a position open, take the time to evaluate your billing office structure,- Woodcock says. If registration-related denials plague your follow-up staff, for instance, consider hiring from your front office instead of hiring another follow-up staffer.