3 patient billing workflow areas that are costing you money

Is your healthcare organization losing money to inefficient patient billing workflows?

You’re likely all too familiar with the losses that you can incur from write-offs and denials, but you may be surprised at the hidden costs that come with a few very common workflow issues.

The following three billing workflow challenges cause a lot of headaches and cost significant amounts of money for organizations like yours.

1. 1. Identifying and correcting rejections
   2. Retrieving and posting remits
   3. Identifying and following up on denials and appeals

For example, let’s say that you have a high rate of rejections. Do you have the visibility into your claims to easily identify why you’re getting so many rejections? Can you quickly determine if they’re occurring due to patient eligibility issues or a recurring error code?

Billing staff must identify the errors causing rejections, make corrections and resubmit claims. All this takes time and effort, and if you have a high enough rejection rate you may even need to bring on additional billers to help manage all of your claims.

1. 1. Identifying and Correcting Rejections

Identifying and correcting rejections causes a number of issues for healthcare organizations. You may feel like you have to choose between billing staff productivity and claims accuracy.

On the one hand, billing staff have enough work on their plates. They don’t have a lot of extra time to manually hunt down claim rejections, figure out the causes of those rejections and correct them manually.

On the other hand, skipping this process could mean leaving a lot of money on the table. You could mitigate this challenge by hiring more billing staff, but then you have to deal with increased overhead.

Instead, get the best results by using an application that allows you to search for rejections by cause and ensure that all rejected claims are worked in a timely manner. As a result, you’ll be getting the best of both worlds saving billing staff time and increasing claims accuracy.

1. 2. Retrieving and posting remits

This is another area where manual processes can be very expensive. When you deal with Medicare, Medicaid and numerous payers every day, remit retrieval and posting can be a massive effort and time sink.

Manually retrieving and posting remits from multiple payer websites can take hours out of your day. If you could do it automatically with a centralized source for all your payers, you could save your organization significant time and money.

1. 3. Identifying and following up on denials and appeals

If you have denials and appeals, you could potentially be leaving money on the table. Manually identifying and following up on individual denials is anything but cost effective. It’s a huge drain on billers time. Plus, when these processes are manual, there’s a lot of room for mistakes, which can drag out A/R days even further and increase your chance for rejections.

If you’re tired of losing money to inefficient billing workflows, we have good news. Inovalon offers applications that can help your organization with a centralized approach that significantly reduces time-consuming manual processes.

To learn more about how Inovalon can help your organization save time and money, click here.