6 Essentials to Look for in Clinical Billing Services
Choosing a medical billing partner is a big decision.
Clinical billing services will be responsible for the financial foundation of your medical practice. They will handle the bulk of your billing through insurance companies and help patients. In other words, they are responsible for efficiently managing nearly all of the revenue that comes into your practice.
It’s no longer feasible in most cases to use an in-house biller. You need a large-scale, professional medical billing service that has experience, the right technology, and data resources to streamline your practice and manage your entire revenue cycle.
You need to work with the right medical billing partner to protect your business and cash flow.
How to Choose a Medical Billing Service
When choosing a clinical billing service, there are six things you must have to manage your billing and collections efficiently:
- A large, experienced team
- Transparency
- Visual dashboards
- Robust technology
- Personal service
- Aggressive follow-up
A Large, Experienced Team
As a part of most practices, you may not have the revenue to hire multiple people to handle all of your billing. That means everything flows through a single individual. In today’s high-turnover environment, though, this can put your revenue at risk if just one person leaves your practice. If they are out sick, on vacation, or go out on maternity/paternity leave, that can shut you down and affect your cash flow.
When you work with an expert group with highly experienced staff members, you can maintain continuity even if staff members leave or are unavailable.
Billing and coding also require specialized knowledge and continuing education due to constantly changing guidelines and reimbursement policies. For example, in 2022 alone, there were more than 400 additions, revisions, and deletions to the list of CPT codes, not including new insurance rules. It can be challenging to stay on top of it all.
When you work with a large, experienced medical billing service, not only will you remain up to date, but you will also have access to specialists in key areas.
TRIARQ has a large, experienced team of coders, billers, and specialists ready to handle all of your medical billing needs.
Transparency
Complete transparency is absolutely crucial for each and every medical billing code. You want to be able to examine every entry down to individual line items, including:
- When a claim was submitted
- How much was paid
- When revenue is received
Many billing services will only provide monthly totals which don’t allow you the granular transparency you need. While you should be able to trust your medical billing provider, you also want the ability to verify everything.
Avoid companies that don’t give you this level of transparency or only provide percentages of collections versus billing.
TRIARQ provides complete transparency into every transaction, allowing you to drill down to any claim you want. You also get monthly scorecards and reports to help you continually measure and improve your bottom line.
Visual Dashboards
While you want the ability to drill down to individual items, you also want a visual dashboard that lets you track what’s happening at a glance. This allows authorized users to process information quickly without the need for complicated or extensive training. The best visual dashboards are intuitive and allow you to customize them to see the information the way you want.
TRIARQ has a detailed visual billing dashboard that helps practices quickly understand the financial health of their business and the status of their insurance and billing claims.
Robust Technology
You want to work with a medical billing service that has robust and reliable technology at its core. Not only is this essential to ensure a smooth and seamless process, but the right technology can help you improve performance and efficiency.
Look for technology that lets you and your clinical billing service provide insights and analyze trends to optimize revenue.
TRIARQ is driven by technology. We were born as an electronic medical record (EMR) supplier, so data, analytics, and automation are part of our DNA.
Personal Service
Automation, technology, and processes can go a long way to reducing your costs and improving your efficiency, but you also deserve personal service from people who care about your practice. You shouldn’t have to wait in queues with long hold times or deal with a robo-responder on a 1-800 hotline.
When you have an issue, you want to talk to someone who can solve your problem. TRIARQ prides itself on providing personal service when you need it. We have a few layers of management to provide you with faster service and provide direct access to senior executives. It’s one of the things customers tell us they love about us.
Aggressive Follow-Up
You also want to work with clinical billing services that provide aggressive follow-up to make sure your bills get paid. Some billing services will advertise low rates on collected revenue with high first-pass claim acceptance levels. However, this often comes at the expense of claim follow-up. When you consider that industry averages show that nearly 20% of all claims are denied, rejected, or underpaid, that’s a significant amount of revenue to put at risk if you’re not on top of resubmissions.
At TRIARQ, you also get aggressive follow-up by a dedicated, professional Accounts Receivable team to make sure you get what you are owed. Whether you’re chasing insurance claims or collecting directly from patients, TRIARQ can handle it for you to cut down your collection costs and avoid collection agencies.
A Comprehensive Billing and Payment Management Solution
TRIARQ provides a comprehensive billing and payment management solution for your modern practice. We provide custom integrations, so there’s no exporting or importing from your EMR to the billing software. We also provide a full review and coaching on how to improve your coding to maximize your revenue and meet value-based care metrics.
With TRIARQ, you can leave collections to us, saving yourself both time and money.
If you would like to learn more about a TRIARQ Health partnership, call our team today at (877) 456-3671 or contact us online.