Medical billing is an important part of any medical practice. Medical care is expensive and it’s becoming increasing difficult for patients to pay their bills due to rising medical cost. Not only is medical cost increasing, the health insurance companies are paying much closer attention to the medical care that is billed to insurance. Medical billing errors aren’t just bad for patients but it can also affect the long-term creditability and profitability of a medical clinic. A patient’s bill starts when they first check in and receives care. Afterwards, how the patients’ medical services are determined and billed is based on how the services were coded. Once the medical records have been coded by the coder, the data can be used in a number of ways. For example, how a patient’s medical data is coded affects how much a patient’s health insurance will pay for the expense incurred or deny the claims. Not only are medical codes used for billing purpose, it can also be used for research purpose to determine disease prevalence across different states or help predict area of future health care expense. For this purpose, when medical records are coded, they should be completely free of errors.
Here are some common medical coding errors that results in insurance claim reimbursement denial.
- Incorrect patient information such as name, date of birth, and insurance ID numbers.
- Wrong provider information and policy number.
- Incorrect codes.
- Mismatched medical codes.
- Duplicate codes.
- Undercoding.
These are only a few examples of medical coding errors that can result in the delay of reimbursement to your clinic. Often this can result in lost revenue, and a significant impact to patient care making it difficult for them to get the care they need. This can severely lower the quality of care. In the most severe case, these minor errors in coding could lead to audits or fraud charges. This most sever case can impact a medical practices reputation.
Your practice can greatly benefit from outsourcing medical coding. Outsourcing medical coding can free your clinic to focus on patient care knowing that you have a large staff to undertake this task. The amount of coding work can be scaled to the volume and load that fits your clinics need. Coding schemes constantly change and our staff are up to date with the latest changes in the industry. This relieves some pain in your practice from having to constantly train and educate medical coding staff. Simply put, if you are not coding correctly, you are losing revenue. HCC Coders can help you, give us a call at 877-328-2343.