Billing is one of the most important behind the scenes tasks in any business, but especially in a medical practice. Billing is how you bring in the funds to pay for your facility’s overhead, and billing is where your revenue comes from. With that in mind, this is an extremely important process to streamline for greater efficiency, and there are a number of strong health IT solutions out there to help your practice do just that. Let’s explore some of them now.
What HIT solutions improve medical billing?
The first solution that can improve medical billing is providing online payment options. While this isn’t a new technology, it’s one that’s gaining in traction. Patients want to be able to address their medical bills in much the same way they do any other bill they acquire – quickly, easily, and preferably online. By providing an online payment option, patients will be more satisfied with your practice and you’re likely to receive patient balances in a more timely manner.
The same can be said for mobile payments. While online payments are great, mobile payments go a step further and this is a step that patients absolutely want to take. With mobile payments, patients are able to view and pay their health balances directly from their smartphone or tablet through a customized text message. This provides an outstanding level of convenience and drives greater revenue to your practice.
Finally, automated settlement is a great way to improve cash flow while also simplifying the payment process for your patients. Today’s consumers are typically set up for some type of automatic payment already, often for a subscription plan of some kind. And many of these same consumers are willing to have their payment information stored on file at their medical practice so that their balances can be efficiently taken care of without hassle. Doing so makes payment plans easier, allowing flexibility for patients while also ensuring that you don’t lose revenue. It’s truly a win/win that satisfies patients and practices alike.
What are the challenges of medical billing and some benefits from HIT solutions?
Of course, medical billings has its challenges as anything else does. One of the bigger challenges when it comes to medical billing is keeping patients informed about their billing situation. When a patient knows and understands their balance and payment options, they’re more likely to make those payments. It can, however, be time consuming to manually educate each individual patient on their billing status. This is one area where automation and software solutions can be helpful.
Obtaining on-time payments is another challenge. This can relate back to patients not being well-informed about their billing status, but it can also be about a lack of convenient payment options, financial hardships, or simply poor planning. Whatever the cause, it still affects your bottom line and that needs to be corrected. IT solutions can eliminate most barriers to on-time payment with the exception of financial hardships.
Payment accessibility is another challenge. If your practice is not offering multiple pathways through which patients can pay their balance, you’re likely to have trouble securing payment. Today’s patients are busy and need to be able to conveniently take care of business whenever they have a spare second. Efficiency is key here, and without it on-time payments will suffer.
Finally, all of these challenges lead to the most overwhelming challenge of them all – revenue loss. There are a number of factors that can cause revenue loss, some of which we’ve just discussed, but either way it can be both frustrating and harmful to your practice’s success. This is one challenge that you must offset if you want to keep your practice up and running and health IT solutions are great for increasing revenue.
How do these solutions increase revenue? In a few ways. Of course by providing more convenient options for payment, you’re eliminating as many barriers to payment as possible for patients. Essentially, with enough payment options, the only thing that could keep your patient from paying is financial hardship and that can be addressed through payment plans. Additionally, medical billing solutions help to reduce office expenses, also increasing revenue. This can be through a reduction in printing and mailing cost, staff time, and collection services. However it happens, it helps to improve the practice’s bottom line and that’s necessary to keep providing quality patient care.
Medical billing solutions also provide real-time data access and analysis. This allows a practice to keep their finger on the financial pulse of their business, identify concerning trends before they cause major issues, and finding ways to improve the billing process even more.
Finally, many medical billing solutions will help with error reduction, easing the risk of being audited. The more you have to rely on manual entry, the grater opportunity for human error that exists. By automating and allowing for as many checks and balances as possible, you’re reducing that risk and helping your billing process to become more streamlined and successful.
Billing is indeed an integral part of any medical practice and a great place to focus efficiency efforts for maximum benefit. This is why MicroMD has partnered with a number of outstanding vendors to bring you the tools to improve your billing process and by extension your practice’s bottom line. One such vendor is Worldpay, an integrated ePayments solution that helps your practice collect payments at point of care and keeps your revenue stream in the green. With Worldpay, your practice can improve cash flow, eliminate manual processes, speed up patient payments, and more.
Another solution we offer is MicroMD eStatements, powered by RevSpring. eStatements integrates with MicroMD PM to help your practice minimize back-office processing. Your practice can improve cash flow, eliminate manual processes, lower costs, and speed up patient payments, all with the help of eStatements.
TSI Collections is another one of our partners, enabling your practice to get cash flowing faster, while freeing up your billing office from manual processes. With MicroMD PM integration, clients filter and select accounts based on their preferred criteria. From there, MicroMD creates an electronic file of selected accounts and sends it securely to TSI, where they work their magic and secure your payment.
We also offer four integrated clearinghouse partners for you to choose from: Alveo, Availity, EDIInsight, and TriZetto Provider Solutions. This allows you to choose the clearinghouse that fits the needs of your practice the best.
And, of course, this is all pulled together by MicroMD PM, our solution which automates billing processes and revenue cycle management with intuitive scheduling, automatic eligibility verification, fast easy registration, robust billing features, and integrated collection tools. MicroMD helps you reimagine care delivery and the challenges you tackle in your practice every day.
Are you ready to get more information or jump in and get started? Visit micromd.com or call 1-800-624-8832.
About the author,
Savanna Adams
Savanna is the Marketing Communication Specialist at Henry Schein MicroMD. She schedules emails to clients, prospects, and VARs, manages social media accounts, performs research, writes blogs and eBooks, and much more while helping to support the simple yet powerful MicroMD solutions.
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