How To Reduce Account Receivables Coding: Clever Strategies

To start with, how to reduce account receivables coding?

To reduce account receivables coding, you need to analyze your current state of accounts receivable, make technology investments to cut down on ar days, give patients more options for paying their bills, and enlist professional assistance to collect past-due accounts receivable.

Revenue Cycle Management is fundamental for any healthcare and Medical billing business. Medical Billing Company handling end-to-end billing services is equally responsible for the financial status of their end clients. They make every effort to maximize collection, minimize denials, and meet the company’s revenue targets. However, challenges arise when the claims are denied and Accounts Receivable.

Please continue reading so I can give you more specific instructions on how to reduce account receivables coding.

How To Reduce Account Receivables Coding?

Analyzing Where You Are In Terms Of AR

Without a clear understanding of your current situation, how can you manage your revenue cycle more effectively? Healthcare providers must enhance their revenue cycle by making any necessary changes to boost their current performance in order to differentiate themselves from rivals. It is a good idea to look for new trends that are currently available in the market as more trends are becoming involved in achieving successful medical billing collections.

You can quickly determine your current DAR by using the following formulas if you know your total accounts receivable and total charges for the previous six months:

Average Daily Charges = (total charges for last 6 months) ÷ (number of days in last 6 months)

DAR = (total accounts receivables) ÷ (Average Daily Charges)

Your billing performances will be regarded as average if the outcome is between 40 and 50. Once you have this information, it will be simple to identify the process’s flaws and hopefully eliminate them in the future.

Investing In Technology To Reduce Your Ar Days

Today, a variety of software tools are available to accurately estimate the patients’ out-of-pocket expenses based on their insurance coverage. If you are able to inform them in advance, for instance, before they receive pricey medical attention or medication.

A patient is more likely to make an early payment if they are already aware that the estimates have been given. The status of various bills and payments can also be quickly ascertained by healthcare providers with the aid of medical billing and coding software.

Furthermore, when the primary EHR of a healthcare provider is integrated with the financial system, the results are improved. This automates the revenue cycle’s components and ensures that claims are submitted accurately.

Providing More Options To Patients 

When patients have several payment options, such as using a credit card, a check, an online payment service, or a mobile app, they are more likely to pay their bills. Patients can find it simple to pay their bills thanks to the trained healthcare staff involved in the process. In order to decrease your accounts receivable days, you can combine the healthcare staff with 24/7 online payment options.

Therefore, healthcare institutions should definitely promote digital payments, whether they be made through an online payment portal or a mobile bill payment application. In addition to speeding up the bill-paying process, the digital payment option is thought to be more secure.

Seeking Help From Professionals 

Have you tried the aforementioned tactics, but you’re still having trouble getting paid on time? So you need a professional answer. Due to their expertise in performing such tasks, expert medical coding audit will create a plan based on your healthcare business model. They can really aid you in locating your potential point of failure and emphasizing your advantages. So if necessary, you could consider outsourcing your accounts receivable.

Normal Accounts Receivable Issues

Not Appealing Denied Claim

Many of your claims will be rejected if your medical billing and coding staff lacks sufficient experience and specialty-specific knowledge. The worst part is that the majority of practices won’t keep track of their denials, which costs money. When an insurance company rejects your claim, they will give a justification for that rejection. Your billing team should work in a methodical manner, tracking each claim, analyzing each denial, and timely appealing each denied claim. If you’re unsure, you can always pick up the phone and call the insurance provider. When you do, try to understand the denial reason and request assistance for dealing with the denial. You will be able to collect as much of your accounts receivable portion as possible if you are properly tracking denials and appealing them in a timely manner. 

Not Verifying Patient Benefits

In managing receivables, the process of determining eligibility and benefits is crucial. You can get a complete understanding of how much the insurance will pay, what the patient portion would be, and whether any prior authorization is required when you confirm the eligibility and benefits for your patients. By confirming an individual’s eligibility and access to benefits, your team can provide financial estimates to patients, who will be aware of their insurance coverage and only pay their portion at the time of service. If a patient’s insurance does not cover the procedure, you can talk to them about other payment options. After a procedure is completed, nobody wants uncommunicated patient statements. 

Collection Culture

Because they believe their primary responsibility is to the patient, medical practices frequently hesitate to collect patient portions at the time of the visit. They believe that customer service and collections are two distinct departments that call for various strategies. Only if your patients are informed will you be able to give them excellent customer service. They need to understand the steps that need to be taken, the costs involved, their insurance coverage, and their own contribution. The patient is aware of the full amount due, and your office has more funds to enhance the patient experience. Many businesses are lacking the equipment necessary to efficiently and promptly collect unpaid balances. Creating a culture of collection when done right can improve patient satisfaction. 

Read about: How Long Should A CV Be?

Normal Challenges With Accounts Receivable Processes

We cannot emphasize enough how crucial it is to review your AR in order to avoid serious cash flow issues. The true value of unpaid claims that require your attention should be represented by AR if you file claims on a regular basis and post the remittances as they come in.

Your AR reports won’t be accurate if claims aren’t being submitted, rejected or denied, or payments aren’t being posted; you can’t rely on them.

Let’s look at three optometry offices that Fast Pay Health works with by going over the major AR issues we faced and the solutions we implemented to lower their Aging bucket.

Practice 1

• Challenge: issues with applying the right codes and modifiers for group enrollment procedures. The office had $37,000 or more in outstanding 60+ day Aging bucket.
• Solution: Processes for provider authorization and group enrollment with all insurance payers have been made simpler. At $3,700 right now, the AR Aging bucket has been cut by 90%.

Practice 2

• Challenge: With $160,000 in an outstanding 60+ day Aging bucket, cash flow was incredibly low.
• Solution: Multiple coding and modifier mistakes, as well as false information, were fixed for nursing facility Medicare claims that were denied. The AR was quickly reduced to $112,000 by simply fixing the Medicare claim denials.

Practice 3

• Challenge: $10,000+ in outstanding 30-120 days Aging bucket.
• Solution: reviewed, cleaned up, and corrected any denied or rejected claims as needed to recoup the owed sums. Prior to submission, Fast Pay Health ensured that all new claims were accurate and fault-free. The 30-day bucket of 30-plus outstanding Aging dropped to $2,000.

Why Should Your Holistic Practice Monitor Turnover In Accounts Receivable?

It’s critical for holistic practices to know how many days pass between the bills being paid and the payments being received because if patient visits are stable, incoming money should be too.

The amount of uncollected payments, including those for out-of-pocket expenses or insurance reimbursements, is shown by the practice’s accounts receivable (A/R). The objective of a thriving holistic practice is to streamline operations to increase payment speed, which may entail reducing billing and coding errors or improving claim follow-up. Practices can identify which payers are behind and develop relationships with them to understand why by keeping track of the amount of time claims spend in A/R.

If you are aware of how long it typically takes between a patient visit and payment collection, you can quickly determine whether your team is submitting claims to payers slowly. Additionally, you will comprehend how much money you must keep in the bank, for how long, in order to cover operating costs before reimbursements.

How Are Accounts Receivable Calculated?

To get a sense of your starting point, calculate your current “Days A/R” by looking back at your billings:

• Calculate the average daily charges for a specific number of months by summing the charges posted during that time and dividing by the overall number of days in those months.
• By the typical daily charges, divide the total amount owed.

The average days in accounts receivable is the outcome. One starting point for ongoing measurement on a quarterly basis, for instance, would be to look back at the previous three months. You can determine if that baseline accurately represents your performance over time by comparing those three months to the three or six months that came before them.

The ideal A/R period is thirty days. Investigate right away if your average accounts receivable period exceeds 60 days. Is there a slow-paying customer? Do certain processes seem to be causing an increase in denials? Have any of your claims contained mistakes that needed to be fixed?

By bucketing and aging your receivables, you can start monitoring and better comprehending your billings if you’re in the range of 45 days or less.

As you are aware, each payer follows their own schedule. To understand when an insurer reimburses you, you can compare payments made with bills received. This could be within a 30- or 60-day window – providing your team with more knowledge on when a given bill has reached its “late payment” threshold and it’s time to contact the payer.

FAQs

Final Words

The article’s main focus was on reducing the coding for account receivables.

It can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour to thoroughly investigate a single claim in the time-consuming process of researching unpaid claims. You have a team of professionals working daily on your AR cleanup and insurance follow-up when you use a specialized billing service like Fast Pay Health.

We examine aging claims and AR to determine why open balances are still owing, we investigate unpaid claims, we take the necessary actions to recover the debt, we confirm receipt of claims with insurance companies, and we enter the claims into your practice management system, cleaning up your AR.

Do you finally comprehend how to reduce account receivables coding? Thank you so much for reading. Have a great day, and thanks for reading!