RADIOLOGY BILLING SERVICES AND REVENUE COLLECTION
Radiology practices face a lot of challenges during reimbursement collection. Today’s radiology practices deal with a great amount of economic pressure. Radiology billing services have declined over the past decade, provider salaries have dropped, compliance policies are changed, high-deductible health plans are commonplace, and the costs of employing staff to provide services, such as radiology medical billing and audits, have increased.
All of these factors have influenced the practices’ operating margins. Consequently, practitioners should look for new strategies to manage these dynamic factors. In this article, I have enlisted a handful of ways that practitioners can accelerate radiology billing services to earn maximum revenue on return.
Outsourcing radiology billing services is one way that practices can save money in this economic crisis. Not only will outsourcing cost approximately 20% less than doing it in-house. However, radiology medical billing services can leverage their expertise to help the practice improve their bottom line to achieve financial goals.
For example, expert radiology medical billing companies can provide you with assistance to collect more money from patients upfront. Perform coding audits, provide insight on the benefits of using EHR and EMR tools. These innovative billing solutions would help practitioners to better manage denials, assist with strategic growth planning and payer contracts.
Moreover, outsourcing radiology billing services may provide a more objective approach to estimate the result of radiology medical billing services. It offers a fresher perspective of reimbursement collection that internal staff can.
As radiology specialists are not limited to a specific geographical boundary, because physicians can virtually interpret images from anywhere. Therefore, having a remote billing partner that can understand regulations and provide reliable radiology billing services across state lines is paramount.
Let’s probe into a closer look at the top 6 ways a radiology medical billing company can provide guidance about successful radiology practices.
1. INCREASE PRE-SERVICES PATIENT COLLECTIONS
Unlike hospital-based providers, imaging centers and clinic-based radiology practices can interact with patients prior to providing services. It gives them a chance to verify demographic information more accurately than patients who come through an emergency room. Practices can check patients’ eligibility and ensure that they have suitable coverage. They can also collect co-pays and deductibles before facilitating the patients with their services.
Ultimately, through face-to-face interaction, a practice can improve its revenue collection per procedure and accelerate its cash flow. In this way, it also reduces its days of outstanding account receivables. Outsourcing radiology billing services would practitioners take advantage of eligibility tools, deductible insights, and coverage discovery type tools at a single fixed price. Hence, a radiology billing company will benefit a practice’s upfront collection and help to increase practitioners; self-payments.
2. PERFORM MEDICAL CODING AUDITS
Certified medical coding specialists are uniquely qualified to perform reviews. Medical coding audits help practices ensure that services are coded correctly and assess the quality of their financial environment.
Although, this is all part of the practices’ risk reduction strategy, which they should utilize into a compliance plan. Having a truly independent review also helps to eliminate bias and ensures greater accuracy in generated results.
3. EMPLOY BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE RULES
Although a typical radiology practice doesn’t have the expertise and capital to develop AI and predictive analytical tools, while most of the radiology medical billing companies do. After the prevalence of AI solutions for the healthcare industry, experts have developed several multiple solutions for medical billing by using a tremendous amount of data in order to increase the efficiency of the healthcare industry.
New technologies have enabled radiology medical billing experts to identify a red flag that can a radiology practice recognize a billing and coding problem before a bill or claim is submitted. Handling these problems upfront and in real-time can prevent administrative delayed and expensive appeals down the road. Ultimately, leading to more timely payments and reimbursement.
Radiology medical billing companies who provide completely transparent services also allow practitioners to view real-time data from interactive dashboards. This data gives providers insight into what charges were generated, cash collected that day, how a production office’s key performance indicators are trending, and insight into providers’ productivity.
In this way, practices can use a large data set to predict how can they use their collected revenue in order to confirm their business’ success. This fosters greater accountability of cash management and motivates providers to improve their productivity and turnaround times.
Radiology billing solutions can also help with benchmarking revenue and quality, both of which are increasingly relatable. These solutions have also embedded efficacy in reporting financial results such as revenue cycle automation, where data can be gathered and presented for better business decision making.
4. BETTER CLAIM MANAGEMENT
Denials are catastrophic for all radiology medical billing operations. A service has been provided, yet the claim requires reworking to result in payment. These remedial activities drive unwanted operational costs, frustration, and cash flow delays.
Most systems have multiple edits that attempt to improve the accuracy of claims that contain errors and omissions. But now larger organizations can use AI to help identify problematic claims by mining years of claims data by payers, patterns emerge which provide useful and actionable insights to accelerate the results of radiology billing services.
Modern radiology medical billing solutions can sift through an array of data to gain insights into making the business processes more efficient and effective. In the overall healthcare revenue cycle management system, AI-based medical billing solutions can examine the different rules that payers apply and where potential claim denials can arise within the plan. Particularly, it makes practices stay up-to-date about the rules for diagnosing imaging, and when prior authorizations are required.
Hence, radiology medical billing solutions also help to predict which course of action will resolve a denial most efficiently. Many radiology medical billing companies attempt to understand your existing systems by using advanced software solutions and recommend the best ways to manage denials, thus, accelerate your reimbursement.
5. FOCUS ON BUSINESS GROWTH STRATEGIES
To remain viable, radiology practices should identify growth opportunities and leverage their bottom-line. Having market analysis information is critical for any group hoping to secure or expand its market share. Big data sets from proprietary sources enable practices to identify both understand markets and areas of opportunity.
Market data (collected from the specific geographic areas) is also important to get an insight into the values of a practice’s services. Therefore, learning data sets as well as collecting and reporting on that information in a useful manner can be quite challenging and expensive for an individual’s practice. So practitioners should outsource radiology billing services to a professional medical billing company that can invest their time and resources in collecting this big data to drive positive results for your practice. Having a medical billing partner in place can prevent a practice from underutilizing capital by building an imaging center in a location where it doesn’t maximize its internal investment.
6. LEVERAGE PAYER CONTRACTS
Hospital-based radiology practices typically contribute to most payer contracts. This contribution can increase cash predictability and can prevent a managed care company from doing services line carve-outs, which are hazardous for practices.
Typically, managed care companies have access to more data that can help them while negotiating when developing contracts with payers. Having a radiology medical billing partner that has experience and exposure to multiple markets can help to scale up the playing field. Most of the top-notch medical billing companies can also help in the contract review and negotiating process each year. A reliable medical billing company always makes sure that their clients receive fair fees and timely reimbursements on the payer side as well.
ACT NOW
The future of healthcare will only become more unpredictable. A radiology practice should accelerate its medical billing services in order to earn maximum profits now. They should reap all the benefits of outsourcing billing services to the best medical billing company, putting it in a stronger position as turbulent times ensue.
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