Cardiac Billing Is Not For The Faint Of Heart
Medical billing is a critical service that supports healthcare providers by submitting claims and collecting payments from insurance companies and patients. Medical billing specialists need to be experts to guarantee that the bills are in full and in a speedy manner. It is quite common for over 20% of a practice’s collectable revenue to remain unclaimed because of improper coding and ineffective collection tactics.
Outsourcing medical billing is growing in popularity as a method for addressing this remarkable loss of practice income. The range of outsourcing options runs from exceedingly large organizations to individual freelancers working from home to provide medical billing services.
Although the complexity of basic medical billing is quite high, it pales in comparison to the complications that come to play for cardiology billing. Successful navigation of the payers’ policies and procedures for paying surgery claims requires specialized knowledge that comes from experience with billing for cardiologists.
The choice of an experience billing provider has become all the more important for cardiologists as they watch their cost rocket upwards. With their margins shrinking they must be confident that their medical billing service is collecting every dollar the cardiologist is owed. Selecting the proper medical billing service is made all the more difficult by the fact that many companies claiming to be experts in billing for cardiovascular practices actually do not do the billing themselves, but outsource the work to other vendors that are based in India or work from their homes.
Deep familiarity and comfort with cardiology procedures and terminology does not come from serving one or two cardiologists. Cardiac billing success requires both broad and deep expertise in order to collect all of the money owed the cardiologist and successfully appeal claims which have been denied or answer questions the payers may have about a claim.
A company that does not encompass a wide range of cardiovascular billing experience will find it difficult to track underpayments since multiple procedure rules and cardiovascular procedures have significantly more complicated contractual adjustments than a typical family doctor or internist’s claims. In addition, the billing software and system design of a generalist billing company will often be insufficient for the more complicated requirements of reporting and insurance follow-up required in billing for cardiovascular practices.
These billing complications extend to the patient collections arena as well. The patient collection process for specialists like cardiologists is more complicated because of the large patient balances often owed, the complexity of the procedures/EOBs that must be explained to patients that do not understand their bills and the older population cardiologists typically serve. A medical billing service with expertise in billing for cardiology knows how to deal with these situations. Billing services without such experience will increase the risk of both lower patient collections and upset patients confused about their bill.
The bottom-line: It is not worth the risk for a cardiologist to use a billing company that is not as focused as he or she is on cardiology. Just as a patient should not go to a family doctor for complex cardiovascular diagnostics, a cardiologist should not go to a generalist billing company for medical billing.
Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II