This month we are changing our Medical Billing Tip of the Month contest—you will be the judge! Listed below are the three top tips submitted this month (out of the many great ideas we received!). Just read them over and then post on our Facebook page which number is your choice for Medical Billing Tip of the Month. You can also post your choice in the Comments box here on our blog. Either way, be sure to vote before the deadline of Wednesday, February 1! The winner will receive a $250 American Express Gift Card and the acclaim of their peers. Here are the candidates:

1.      Review Your Fee Schedule Yearly

Are you leaving money on the table that could be in your pocket?

Do you review your fee schedule yearly? If not, chances are you are not collecting as much reimbursement as you could be. Under priced fees can cost a practice thousands of dollars every year.

Here are a couple ways to add those extra $$ to your pocket. Compare your fees to Medicare and Contracted Commercial Payers fee schedules. You can purchase a fee analyzer, which can be expensive, or if you are the do-it-yourself type person like me, you can download the payers fee schedules and copy and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet to compare your fees to specific payers. You can even use Excel and create a column to calculate your new fees, setting them above the payer contracted rates.

2.    Short Cut Tip for Entering Diagnosis Codes

I have a short cut tip for entering diagnosis codes while entering charges.

Make it easier to find an ICD-9 code when entering charges on the change entry screen. If you have loaded your Local Name into the Diagnosis code list, when you go to search for a code while holding down the Shift ? key you can then search by the criteria that your office uses for a diagnosis.

For example, if you use “UTI” a lot and there are no other symptoms, you can input the word UTI into the Local Name field and when you search for it, the code pops up.

To add a Local Name (or you can call it your office Diagnosis Code nickname), go to:

Settings

Codes

Find Diagnosis.

Double click on the code to which you wish to give a nickname, and in the Local Name box, enter it there. Save it and next time you want to search for it when entering charges, the nickname should come up. This saves me a lot of time.

3.      Method for Increasing Collections at Time of Service

We are always looking for a way to increase collections at the time of service. We don’t want to send statements for copays, etc., when the patient was in the office. We use Kareo to track how we do each month collecting these payments.

We set-up Categories for our payments. We have Copay, Deductible, Coinsurance, Payment Plan, and Insurance payments. As the patient makes a payment, we use these categories to track payments. Each month, we run a Payment Summary report, grouped by Category. We can then see how we are doing collecting the various payments.

As a side benefit, there has been a competition to see who collects the most each month. We run a Payments Detail report by Patient and look at the batches for each person. At the end of each quarter, we give a prize to the person that collected the most copays, coinsurance and deductibles. It has really improved our collections and provided some moral boost for our front office.

Which one is your top choice? Vote now on our Facebook page or in the Comments box on this blog. You have until Wed., February 1, to vote! We’ll announce the winner in our February newsletter.