Practicing medicine—and specialized disciplines within the broader field, such as podiatry or audiology—requires a multidisciplinary array of skills. A successful practice relies not only on excellent patient care, but detailed and thorough administration. There is a large number of bills, documents, and procedures that must be carefully handled at every stage. Over time, software that assists through the processes of patient intake, scheduling, and billing also provides metrics that help you analyze your current processes and partnerships, find the pain points, and help show you a path to make the administrative side of your practice run more smoothly.
Those who set up an effective medical practice management (MPM) strategy are able to grow their practice. On the other hand, inefficiencies in practice management can lead to lost revenue, poorer patient care, and damaged reputations.
What Is Practice Management?
MPM consists of most of the work you do that is not directly related to providing health care. The administrative side of your practice needs to run smoothly in order for you to provide effective patient care that keeps your patients returning to you for their medical needs. It’s important to staff your office with competent professionals, as well as to enlist a medical billing services provider who can help the talented professionals who work in your office to do their jobs more effectively.
An important aspect of your MPM strategy is the software you use to maintain your schedule, billing, and records. At Healthcare Revenue Group, we use the eCW software, which is specifically tailored to suit the needs of each individual practice we work with.
Planning Visits
When a new patient makes an appointment, they enter into your system. Their appointment is scheduled in an available slot. Returning patients are scheduled the same way. Each appointment—including a cancellation—is documented in the system as part of a detailed record.
Managing Patient Data
Your system must involve a database of important personal information for each of your patients. This includes their names, insurance information, medical history, and anything else a healthcare provider might require. This data not only must be called up with every visit, but also helps analysts to consider new insurance networks you may wish to join, or other ways that your practice management strategy could be better-aligned with the services you provide.
Billing and Claims Process
Billing an insurance company for medical services is a complicated procedure. Coding mistakes or accidental double-billing for services can result in a claim denial, which creates more costs as well as a delay in payment. Your system needs to be lazer-accurate in its use of current insurance codes. The eCW software uses a cloud-based update procedure to ensure that your system is up-to-the-minute with coding updates, and our staff ensures that the bills that reach your insurance networks will be paid. Claim denial can be reduced to about 2%.
While we work to establish best practices in terms of reducing claim denials, we also manage claim denials when they occur. When patients have questions, they can call a phone line we establish in your area code to answer their questions.
Reporting
A good MPM strategy will provide an avenue for detailed reporting on any number of elements of your practice. Patient demographics, frequency of missed appointments, the time that employees spend on a given task, the amount of time that bills spend in accounts receivable, and more are all recorded for analysis by our expert team. Using these data, we are able to advise on updates to your MPM strategy.
A Comprehensive Approach
The administration of your healthcare practice needs to be handled comprehensively. If one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, confusion can ensue and result in mismanagement. We’ll work with you to establish the practices that make the most sense for your facility. We will train your staff in the use of the systems we establish. We have established relationships with numerous insurance providers, which helps to make the complicated process of provider enrollment to move as smoothly and quickly as possible. Healthcare Revenue Group is also one of the few medical billing services companies with special knowledge in the realm of hearing healthcare and audiology.
Contact us today to find out how we can help increase revenue and grow your practice.
