Are you worried about the huge billing backlog of your clinic? If yes, learn here how to resolve your clinic’s billing backlog.
It’s another day at the clinic—your own private practice that you worked a day-in and day-out to get off the ground to serve and help people. You hired passionate and enthusiastic staff members who share your vision of a clinic that patients love and recommend. But you’re a few hours into the workday, and your administrative staff is already stressed with work. They’re barely meeting deadlines and receiving complaints.
Managing the billing process is an essential part of any clinic or private practice’s operations. Similar to how you need to properly stock your practice with essential supplies for emergencies? You need to have a system in place to help your administrative staff manage the influx in billing cycles and varying forms and deadlines. Otherwise, your backlog will keep on piling up, compounding your administrative team’s workload. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way.
How Billing Tasks Become Backlogged
While, in some cases, the billing process can flow smoothly from start to finish, more often than not, something—minor or major—goes wrong. That could happen because one patient’s insurance provider denied their claim for funds, late payments, technical errors, poor communication with the patient or insurance provider, or both.
Because the healthcare industry’s billing cycle is multifaceted and involves three independent parties (your clinic, your patient, and their insurance provider), it’s a fertile land for errors. It starts with the patient checking in to the clinic, submitting their insurance information, then receiving a diagnosis and filing for an insurance claim before your clinic finally gets paid.
Since one of the primary medical billing steps is diagnosis—which the patient needs before they’re able to file for an insurance claim. A particularly elusive diagnosis can significantly slow down the billing process. Or, if the insurance company refuses complete or partial coverage, it can halt payment processing until the feud gets resolved.
To avoid such issues, your administrative staff needs to be mindful of all billing cycle steps. Do the proper paperwork on time, and communicate with the patient throughout the entire process.
Let’s know here how to clear the billing backlog of your clinic.
How to Resolve your Clinic’s Billing Backlog
1. Invest in better billing software
Investing in advanced billing software made for the healthcare industry can prevent many of the problems your administrative staff face doing things the old way. For one, you could automate the majority of the billing process, from insurance eligibility verification and sending out claims to accepting payments, making refunds, and sending reminders.
If you already use NextGen EHR software to manage your clinic, you can automate the process further and medical billing software by Tempdev, which collects data of your previous billing cycles and analyzes it for trends. That way, you can accurately pinpoint the weak areas in your revenue cycle and fix them as soon as they arise.
2. Dedicate More Time and Resources to Staff Training
It’s not enough to have advanced software that can do great things for your clinic without having a staff that knows how to use it. Not everyone has the same technical background of enthusiasm for tech. You need flexible staff training that meets them at their level. And helps them get to where they can comfortably use your clinic’s software to its fullest capabilities.
3. Boost Employee Morale
Your employees and administrative staff, in particular, might be overworked and feeling overwhelmed because of the piling work. They may need an extra push when implementing your tech to use it properly and get back on track. Give them bonuses or breaks for all of their hard work. Praise them on all of the work they did instead of criticizing the ones falling behind because they lacked resources. This basically boosts workplace morale at your business.
4. If Necessary, Consider Co-sourcing or Outsourcing
There are many reasons you should consider staff augmentation, either as a permanent solution. If you’re constantly falling behind on billing or as a backup plan for when there’s an influx in work, like when you’re doing a project that’s draining your human resources.
You can pick between co-sourcing and outsourcing or a combination of both when it comes to improving operations. Doing so will lessen the burden on your staff and allow you to regain your footing with a clean backlog.
5. Using All of What’s Available
To get your backlogged billing cycle back on track, you need to be strategic about utilizing all resources available to you. That may be your in-house staff, augmented staff, software, or outside consultants. The key is to take action as soon as you notice a pattern of delay in the billing cycle, rather than waiting for the backlog to overwhelm your staff and push them to their limits.