Account receivable management is one of the key factors in revenue cycle management for all kinds of industries. Similarly, it is the chief component of the healthcare industry. Most of the insurance agencies pay a large number of bills without which any medical practice or hospital’s expense cannot be recovered. This may lead to the inappropriate medical care of patients that will impact the medical billing group’s reputation. To avoid and optimize your accounts receivable issues here’s list of few tips.

Track the number of days claims spend in A/R

An average number of days a claim is outstanding before it is reimbursed is referred to as “Days in AR” which is the most important key performance indicator for medical practices.

By measuring the numbers of days need to spend to collect on accounts receivable helps to find out the account receivable problems. Measuring includes the timing of billing and collections, AR follows up and denial follow up, etc. If the days in AR is higher, it takes a long time to get paid.

For ASC billing, accounts receivable aging has been tracking in the ASC billing system. For tracking purposes, this system is broken as groups based on the days outstanding like 0 to 30 days, 31 to 60 days, etc. For better ASC billing collections these metrics are examined.

Manage Your Denials Effectively

Proper medical billing and coding help you to reduce rejection and denial rate, yet not completely eliminated. To reduce days in the AR cycle, an effective denial management team is required. It helps to avoid revenue loss by reworking on denials.

For clear follow-up actions, create a list of claim adjustment reason code. Based on similarity, group them.

Some denials would require dispute/appeal with the payer. Use proper dispute strategy, ensure whether the denial is to be disputed or acceptable before appealing.

The appeal success rate always depends on the appeal content. For that, use standard appeal templates.

Utilize preventive denial analysis not only for root cause study; but also to minimize future denial rate.

Prioritize Insurance Verification

For better accounts receivable results in medical practice, initially focus on insurance eligibility verification as a priority. Insurance eligibility verification process not only ensures the patient insurance coverage, it also gets a few more information such as whether they used premium payment, how much of deductibles used etc.

About MGSI

MGSI is a leading Revenue Cycle Management Company in Florida, US with more than 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry. We accelerate the claims process and dramatically reduce the time to collect a practice’s receivables. To know more about our services visit us at www.mgsionline.com