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.

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.

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, creates cleaner claims." This also allows the practice to see consistency in employee behavior and actions, to ensure compliance, repeatability, and replication of actions over time, and to optimize revenue for the practice.

Upfront: Get your claims out the door quickly, and set benchmarks for your claims processing. Tinsley suggests office charges should post in one day, and other services should post within five days. Make sure you keep track of which benchmarks your practice isn't meeting, and determine what the problems are. The longer it takes you to collect, the more likely it is that you won't see any money.

Start follow-up efforts early for unpaid claims. If you-re collecting from a patient, you should send a collections letter after 10 days, Tinsley suggests. If you-re contacting an insurance company about an unpaid claim, begin following up 25-30 days after you submit the claim, he adds.

Good practice: "We divide up the A/R by insurance carriers," Garrity says. Her practice divides all of the networks, payers, and carriers they submit claims to between three staff members, who follow up with their assigned insurance companies on any unpaid or denied claims.

Pointer: Assign the right people, Tinsley stresses. You need to make sure the people on the billing team who are responsible for A/R follow-up and management know how to work each account, capture payment, and work with insurance companies. You also need to make sure you have an adequate number of people focusing on A/R.

You should also continually review and monitor your explanations of benefits (EOBs), paying special attention to your denials. You can glean a lot of information from your EOBs, such as how quickly insurers are paying you, whether your fee schedule is adequate, if your coders are coding properly, why insurance companies are denying your claims, and if you-re getting paid according to your contracted rates.