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Medical Coding or Medical Billing — sometimes, these two terms are mixed or interpreted as one, but in reality, they are two completely different tasks.
A medical clinic won’t be complete without the medical billers. If compared to a machinery, they serve as oil to keep the operations going. Their main task is to ensure billing is done properly and all the medical codes are precise and accurate to ensure their patients are reimbursed properly.
Nobody wants denied claims. It adds up more of your time and resources to sort everything out and most importantly, slows down your cash flow. One or two erroneous claims maybe few for now but these may add up pretty quickly — and before you know it, a large issue
You’re losing lots of money on your practice and you don’t even know it.
How could you not be aware of thousands of dollars being lost, you say? Surely that kind of money can’t just disappear without you knowing.
The answer: bad habits. Bad coding and billing habits to be exact. A lot of physical therapists fall victim to these habits without their knowledge, and it’s not totally their fault. Most of them have been misinformed or got used to a certain system that they didn’t know has long been outdated.
It’s time to break those bad habits and get your practice the profits it deserves!
Habit 1: Forgetting Assessment and Management Time
There are several components that make up your service time: patient assessment and preparation (Pre-Time), performing the procedure (Intra-Time), and lastly, documentation and discharge (Post-Time). One financially deadly habit that PTs make is forgetting to include all of these components into their assessment and management time.
Negotiation. It’s tough to do successfully, especially when it’s not something you were trained for.
As a physical therapist you’re trained to treat people and help them live better and healthier lives, not make financial negotiations. But the fact is you can’t continue to do what you’re trained to do without having to negotiate terms of payment first. This negotiation doesn’t mean simply agreeing to whatever the payer says– it’s making sure you get what your time, service and skills are truly worth– and that’s the hard part right there.
Fortunately there are ways to negotiate terms to your benefit. Following these tips and armed with the right facts and figures, successful negotiation can be achieved.
The first thing you need to do in order to negotiate successfully is to analyze your current payers’ performance and fee schedules. Identify the payers with whom you do the most business along with the most common CPT codes you use. Get the number of times you bill each code with each payer, and multiply each number by the proposed payment amounts. Then add up all the totals per payer and divide by the total number of codes billed. This should give you the weighted average for each payer, and a good indication of which contracts are most valuable to you.
Apart from this you could also compare the rates of individual CPT codes and approach payers who pay the least amount about increasing to at least reach the average reimbursement rate for these codes.
Between hospitals and the numerous other private practices just around the corner, competition can be tough for any private practice. It can be difficult to set your practice apart when many others offer the same services at the same prices. There’s always the solution of providing greater value, but with
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