Payment Posting
One may inquire why does payment Posting hold such significance in the medical billing field? What makes it so special? The answer however is relatively simple, payment posting is pivotal for all Practices regardless of their size, it shows the performance and efficiency of the billing staff or hired medical billing company. Reduced or decreased collections is the red flag that something is not right. Most health care providers decision to change or outsource their billing is based on reduced collections.
Posted payments and frequency of inflows allow practitioners to understand their medical practice’s cash flow cycle and true financial picture. Medical practices decisions regarding expansion and investment in new equipment, and their ability to meet operational expenses are based on its collections.
Healthy and consistent inflows is an evidence of clean and timely billing and strong internal processes. To further improve the revenue cycle Vigilant Medical Billing Services (VBMS) help medical practices to create Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA) and Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT) setups.
Collections consist of 3 main segments, Insurance Payments, Patient Payments, and Injury & Worker compensation payments. In almost 97% of Medical practices, insurance payments make up a major portion, from 80-90% of monthly collections, patient payments account for 10%-15% whereas injury and worker compensations stand somewhere at 5%.
Insurance Payments
Proper coding and billing ensure smooth payments cycle. Many outsourced billing companies focus on primary insurance don’t pay much attention on submitting the bills to secondary insurance. Simply submitting the bills to secondary insurances can improve the overall collections by 3% to 10%. A strong internal process ensures that payment poster properly posts the payment against each CPT and submit the bill to secondary insurance.
Patient Payments
Many insurances require its members to pay a portion of their health care cost in form of Copay, Deductibles, and Coinsurance. The best practice is to collect the patient responsibility at the time of his/her visit, but various organizations lack the tools to calculate the potential patient responsibility and end up sending patients the monthly statements. Vigilant Medical Billing Services (VBMS) help medical practices to collect such payment from patients by reminding them through phone calls, emails, and patient statements. A total of 3 statements are sent followed by a notice to moving the account in collections.
Out of Network/ Injury /Worker Compensation Payments The volume of OON, Injury, and worker compensation cases is relatively quiet less but if negotiated right can yield up to 10 times more collections than an average claim payment. Out of Network and Lien cases require designated payments negotiating team with vast experience in renegotiation and dealing with attorneys. Vigilant Medical Billing Services is an expert in managing OON, Liens and Worker Compensation cases. We follow the claims from beginning to end by protecting our client’s interest and ensure a better negotiated rate which demonstrates the ability of our strong internal processes and improve the monthly cash flow.
Payment posting is a process in itself where collections staff not only ensures the received payment accuracy but also highlight underpaid claims and submit the bill to secondary insurances, generate patient statements, move accounts to collections agencies for non-payments, and forward the denied claims to accounts receivables team so it can be timely corrected and resubmitted.
We at VMBS are well-rehearsed with the technicality and understanding of the process of payment posting. We recognize the importance of this process and how it can boost the finances of the practitioner. Therefore, our team at VMBS pays extra attention to every minute detail of this service. Outsourcing your billing to Vigilant Medical Billing will be a game changer for your practice especially if you run a large practice and have to pay multiple providers towards the end of the month based on their individual collections or units in case of Anesthesia, ABA, Occupational, and Physical Therapy.