Practice Management Alert

Tip: Assign each biller a list of payers to contact every month. You know that every penny counts, and submitting a claim is only half the battle. Effective accounts re-ceivable (A/R) management is one of the biggest keys to ensuring your practice receives the reimbursement you-re entitled to. If you aren't monitoring your A/R and following up on unpaid claims, then you could be costing your practice hundreds. Reports Are Key to Evaluating A/R You can't manage what you can't measure, so you need to produce a variety of reports to help you evaluate your A/R, says Reed Tinsley, CPA, CVA, CFP, a healthcare accountant and consultant based in Houston, Texas. Tip: Invest in a good practice management system, and learn all of its capabilities. "Any system can bill, but can it help you collect?" Tinsley asks. Pay special attention to the reporting abilities of the system you use to be sure you get the data you need to manage your practice's A/R, such as the practice's gross collection rate, net collection rate, and average days in A/R for claims. You can then use this information to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of your practice's A/R management. Example: Days in A/R is a single number that tells you on average how long it takes you to get paid after you provide a service. Calculating your days in A/R is a useful process because you can benchmark the time it takes you to collect for services compared to other practices. It also enables you to communicate with your physicians and let them know how long after a procedure or service they-ll get paid. Get help: Additionally, there are clearinghouse services now available that provide powerful claims management functionality to assist practices, in particular for practices that have weaker practice management systems. Look for this when you are shopping for your clearinghouse service. Set Procedures Ensure Fewer Missed Opportunities You should have written procedures and policies covering every step of the billing and collections process: the appointment setting, the service provided, the billing, the collection, and the follow-up. Having a set A/R follow-up procedure can help your practice and ease your billing headaches in a multitude of ways. The main benefit is that a set procedure allows you and the rest of the practice's billing staff "to really learn the ins and outs" of the insurance companies you work with, says Anne Garrity, medical collector for Alpine Family Physicians in Lake Zurich, Ill. "Thus translating into more money being brought into the practice because a collector would know how to have denials appealed correctly, and the billers could go to those collectors with questions about what the carrier covers, which, in turn, [...]