Ever-changing insurance policies, federal laws, billing and coding guidelines. These factors have made the laboratory billing services extremely complicated than ever before. As a result, mistakes have become a normal phenomenon. But if you don’t take the frequent mistakes seriously, you have to face critical financial challenges. For example, billing and coding errors can lead to claim denials. If the denial rate crosses the specified limits, then laboratory practitioners can lose millions of dollars. So, in order to avoid significant financial loss, lab technicians should follow quality standards while managing the lab medical billing process. For this purpose, they need dedicated and highly trained staff to look after the lab medical billing process. If you are losing a significant amount of your hard-earned revenue, then it’s the right time to analyse your lab billing process. You should implement smart laboratory billing solutions to ensure accuracy in claims management. Try to recognize major areas of problems that impact the revenue collections management negatively. Then you should adopt preventive measures to eliminate such problems from the lab billing system. In this way, you can make significant improvements in your practice. Here are the following mistakes that can cause multiple economic challenges for healthcare providers.

1. Inaccurate Medical Coding

The inaccurate translation of diagnosis, injuries, treatments, prescriptions, medical services and equipment into standard codes can land you in serious troubles. There are some coding errors that can not only lead to financial loss but also can cause medical fraud and abuse. For example, failure to stay compliant with coding standards may head towards medical frauds i.e. unbundling, upcoding, overcoding.

Upcoding:

It is a procedure of charging patients more by using medical codes for the expansive procedure than actually performed. Mostly lab billers intentionally adopt this approach to generate more revenue.

Unbundling:

It is the concept of using a multitude of medical codes for the set of closely related medical services that can be included in a single medical code. If your laboratory practice has a history of such errors, then you can face legal troubles such as: federal penalties, heavy fines and even imprisonment. So, in order to keep your laboratory billing services optimized with accurate medical coding, you must closely monitor the performance of your billing and coding staff. You must ensure that your lab billing team submitting the claims according to the industry standards. Moreover,  make sure that your coding staff stay up-to-date with the new, deleted or modified medical codes.  As the coding process is complicated in nature, you should not rely upon the inexperienced coding staff. The best solution to avoid coding errors is a consultation with reliable laboratory billing companies. Because a lab billing agency holds highly trained and certified coders. That works for a single purpose, which is to increase the profitability of your lab practice. They have in-depth industry knowledge and the required skills to execute the error-free billing and coding process.  This practice would embrace error-free lab billing and coding processes.

2. Duplicate Billing

It is another major factor that slows down the laboratory billing services. It happens when the lab billers bill twice for the same service.  Duplicate billing can lead to claim denials that hinder the reimbursements. Moreover, when you outsource your lab medical billing services to a trusted third party, you don’t need to worry about it. Because off-shore billers have the extensive industry experience to manage medical claims in an efficient manner. For instance, they have sufficient time to double-check every medical claim before submission.  Which makes sure that there are no chances of duplicate billing. Moreover, they implement automatic laboratory billing solutions to increase the efficiency of the billing and coding process. They submit medical claims electronically. Which enables them to keep a close eye on the status of submitted claims.

3. Insufficient  Medical Documentation

Insurance companies don’t accept medical claims containing errors in patients’ information including; name, date of birth, gender, phone number, address, insurance ID. As a result, lab practitioners may face late payments and cash flow disruption. So, in order to eliminate streamline laboratory billing services, you should invest in the constant training of your registration staff. Because they are responsible for collecting such information. You should keep them aware of how their negligence can impact the entire healthcare revenue cycle management. For example, If your front desk staff does not responsibly verify the pre-authorization of a patient at the time of registration then they are inviting trouble right from the start. It will not only cause complications for your lab billing staff while preparing bills but also hold your patients back from paying you off. Because, if you are not even assured whether to submit a medical claim to an authorized insurance payer or the patient, then you would be able to collect payment from the relevant payer. That’s why front desk training is essential to streamline the lab billing services.  Moreover, invest in the implementation of  Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR).

• EHR can benefit your practice in the following ways:
• Provide accurate, up-to-date, and complete information about patients.
• Enable quick access to patient records.
• Securely sharing electronic information with patients and other clinicians.

Laboratory Billings is a reliable lab billing company in the United States. Which has been providing custom-tailored laboratory billing services to meet your financial needs. Contact us to make the best deal for your lab business.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]