Billing mistakes can cost your organization a lot of revenue. From increased days in A/R to claims rejections, you may be surprised at just how much money you’re leaving on the table. Fortunately, though, you can accelerate A/R days, reduce rejections and greatly increase your clean claims rate with just a few simple, yet highly effective strategies.

Always verify patient information and insurance benefits

First, whether you’re handling billing for a patient for the first time or you’ve been treating them for years, you should always verify their information and their insurance benefits up front. A patient may have moved, changed jobs or their benefits may have changed. These changes can easily result in rejections or denials and delay payment.

Significantly reduce billing mistakes by taking the time to double-check patient information and insurance coverage before submitting a claim.

Eliminate repetitive tasks

You may be wondering where you’ll find the time to verify every patient’s information. Fortunately, those verifications don’t have to add extra work when you can put technology to work for you. This next tip will help you save a lot of time while you say goodbye to even more billing mistakes.

With the right application, such as ABILITY EASE^®All-Payer, you can eliminate repetitive tasks. For example, this application gives you the power to perform batch eligibility checks and run multiple payers and patients in a single session. So, you can ensure that you’ve verified patients benefits information while also significantly decreasing the burden on your billing staff.

Check against the most up-to-date rules

Checking against out-of-date payer rules will inevitably lead to more claims rejections and denials. Unfortunately, those rules can change on a quarterly, weekly or even daily basis. Your claims management tools should update in real time to ensure that you have visibility into the latest rules. With more clean claims, you’ll see a reduction in billing mistakes and decreased days in A/R.

Address potential eligibility issues up front

If you aren’t sure if a patient or group of patients is eligible for certain benefits or coverage, you leave yourself open to claims rejections. Your staff has to deal with the hassle of tracking down those claims and trying to determine what was wrong.

Claims management tools should easily integrate with eligibility verifications to allow you to catch mistakes early, before the claims go out. This saves an enormous amount of time and will likely result in an increased clean claims rate and more revenue coming back to your organization.

Use the right tools for faster correction guidance

When billing mistakes do happen, you can decrease their impact with an application that gives you fast correction guidance. Gone are the days of manually finding the reason for rejections, and then submitting appeals or contacting payers individually. An automated application can route that claim right back to your work queue with a clear message about the corrections needed.

The first step to optimizing your revenue cycle is to correct billing mistakes before they cause revenue problems.

For more tips to streamline your billing processes, check out this infographic on avoiding claims denials.