Healthcare providers are making efforts to protect the health of their medical staff and patients during the battle with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They neglect the importance of optimized laboratory billing services and have to face cash flow disruption. Which is harmful to sustain their existence in the market.

2020 was undoubtedly a tough year in terms of healthcare, regulatory changes,  financial crisis, and many other challenges. The world had to face the most destructive COVID-19 pandemic situation, which not only claimed millions of lives but also impacted the global economy drastically. It seems that the situation might worsen and this new year will be more challenging for laboratory practitioners around the world. Therefore, you should pay special attention to uplift the bottom line of your lab practice.

Healthcare providers must understand the fact that the financial stability of their laboratory practices is highly dependent on streamlined lab medical billing services. The current challenges can inhibit a practice’s ability to collect hard-earned revenue, which can obstruct the practice’s ability to grow. The best solution to overcome these challenges is to outsource coding and billing to a trusted third party.

However, understanding common lab billing challenges can help healthcare providers to solve them before they affect their financial well-being.

Industry changes

The healthcare industry witnesses constant evolutions in terms of medical codes, insurance policies, federal laws, billing rules, etc. So, in order to streamline the laboratory billing services, it is essential to keep pace with these changes. You should invest in constant training of your billing staff to optimize the billing process.

Moreover, the new documentation guidelines for evaluation and management (E/M) services bring unseen challenges for lab billers and coders. So it is essential for laboratory practitioners to analyze and prepare themselves for major billing-related challenges.

Accurate Coding

Medical coding is considered as the invisible engine of an optimized revenue cycle.  Because, the incorrect transformation of medical records including patient diagnosis, treatments, and other medical services into universal standard codes,  can disrupt the entire revenue cycle.

A slight error in coding might lead to claim denials which can damage the financial health of a practice. Therefore, proper medical coding is vital on many levels, from ensuring payment collection to creating a valid record of patient care history.

Moreover, due to the complications in medical coding, it has become a major challenge for healthcare providers. You should hand over this process to highly trained and certified medical coders, who can perform this task in an efficient way.

Electronic Submission of Claims

There are many healthcare providers who are still using outdated methods to collect, compile, process, and even manual submissions of medical claims. Which always leaves room for mistakes.

Moreover, it is also a time-consuming and challenging task for lab technicians. So in order to streamline the laboratory billing services, it is essential to submit the medical claims electronically. Practices can save time and speed up the reimbursements by electronic submission of medical claims.

In addition to this, constantly being interrupted by other tasks can cause distractions that lead to mistakes. No doubt it’s a big challenge but lab technicians should try to hire billing staff, whose sole responsibility during a particular period of time is managing the billing process.

If you are facing challenges to manage the claims process in-house, you should seriously think about outsourcing lab billing services. Because off-shore billing companies have well-experienced billing employees. They ensure the submission of error-free claims in a timely manner. For instance, they double-check the provided data including the patient’s demographic information to file the clean claims. The submission of clean claims reduces the denial rate and streamlines the laboratory billing services of your lab practice.

Effective Denial Management

Claim denials have become a common phenomenon in almost every healthcare practice. Which causes slow reimbursements. It is a fact that you lose a major portion of your hard-earned revenue due to the inefficient management of denied/ rejected medical claims.

Because it’s a time-consuming procedure and healthcare providers don’t have enough time to manage this process along with their busy schedules. They stay engaged in providing quality care to the patients and don’t pay attention to their increasing accounts receivables. However, you can overcome this challenge by implementing an effective denial management system.

Denied claims return back with detailed information about reasons for denials. Lab billers should use this information to identify the common causes of claims rejections/denials. Then after scrubbing, they should appeal the claims on a priority basis. Furthermore, lab billers need to use advanced tools to track each and every submitted claim, until laboratory practitioners get paid.

Are you looking for dependable billing partners? You are at the right place. Laboratory Billings is an industry-leading medical billing company in the United States. That has been providing extensive laboratory billing services for the past 12 years.