How to Grow a Medical Practice and Increase Patient Volume

More jobs in the United States and low unemployment rates mean more employer-funded insurance health plans for employees. Since the affordable care act is offering the marketplace to help low-income people obtain the health policies and get them covered is helping patients to get on the insurance plans. These circumstances can impact positively you to help you to grow your medical practice in an effective way.

How to Grow a Medical Practice

You can focus to grow your medical practice and side by side work on innovative ways on how to increase patient satisfaction in your medical practice. The two important aspects of growing a medical practice are creating a better patient experience at a healthcare facility and to engage with your patients in a way they could feel valued by your medical practice. Your medical practice growth entirely depends on the positive experience which would ultimately lead to positive reviews, referral by your patients. Creating a value-based service is the key to increase patient volume in your medical practice and grow your medical practice faster and easier.

Provide Value-Based Services

If you want to truly unlock the secret of how to grow a medical practice you should consider adding values to your medical practice. We all as a customer think of value before making the decision to buy anything, and this is more important in medical practice growth. You should think of innovative ways, and take your patient’s feedback on how you can improve the value of your services so you could learn from your patients on how to increase patient satisfaction in healthcare.

Develop a Patient Referral System in your Medical Clinic

Having a serious patient referral strategy can help you to grow a medical practice faster and easier. Always provide personal attention and care to your patients and develop a patient referral system so that your current patients can get more benefits by referring your medical practice to other patients within their family, friends, or in their local connections. This can help your medical practice to increase patients in medical practice and ultimately it will help to improve revenue and collections too.

Educate your Patient with Healthcare & Fitness Blogs

If you would like to increase patient satisfaction in healthcare services and gain more trust in your medical practice, you should develop content on your website with different categories. Once the content is developed, then categories your patients into those categories and send them those healthcare education materials to help them align their eating and other healthy habits. For example, if a patient is obese and her BMI index is higher than normal, you can send healthy eating and walking-related education material to her. Another patient has diabetes and you can send her the education material to keep the low blood insulin level and improve physical activity by keeping her active while the third patient who has stress problem can get the education material to keep her calm and satisfied with her life. Such personalized content can help your patients think about value being added in their life and they would be your customer for a longer period.

Patient’s Positive Reviews about Medical Practice

Once your customer showed gratitude and says thanks for your valuable services, don’t just pass the moment by taking the compliment but ask them to leave great reviews for your online business directories. This would help other new visitors and patients to see the value your medical practice is adding to other patient’s lives. Having positive reviews about your medical practice can help you to increase patient volume in medical practice.

Use Social Media Engagements to Grow your Medical Practice

Nowadays, you can find anyone using social media platforms. Social media platforms can provide a great advantage to the healthcare professionals who own the medical practice and these platforms can be used to interact with patients in the nicest way. Engaging with your patients through social media can help you to grow medical practice faster and easier. Don’t always think to grow medical practice but think like a healthcare provider who cares about the patients and this will pay back to you with increase patient volume in your medical practice.

Best Medical Billing Solution for Getting Paid Faster

Medical practices often forget that if a patient’s medical claims are not getting processed faster, this can increase the patient’s frustration and they might end up getting medical bills for services they were expecting to be paid by insurance earlier. Always choose the Best Medical Billing Company to hire the Medical Billing Experts who can get the medical claims faster so the patients could get their EOBs with payments and processing details.

Do you need help with Medical Billing?

If you are wondering how you can improve your medical practice revenue and collections, we can help you with that. We are here to help. iCareBilling is a market’s leading Medical Billing Company helping their clients achieve their business goals and improve their collections and revenue. Contact us today and talk to a Medical Billing Expert to learn how we can help you to streamline your medical practice workflow. Our goal is to take control of your Medical Billing and Collections Process so you can focus on your patients, not on medical billing issues.

Healthcare Denial Management and Medical Billing Solutions

Denial Management in Healthcare always plays an important role to maintain the medical practice profitability, and stability. It’s not only the question of collecting more for your business but to enhance the medical billing process to a level where it could provide better outcomes. To get better healthcare denial management, you must look for a Medical Billing Solutions that can provide quality services to help you focus on patient care.

Denial Management in Healthcare

Medical Billing Companies often focus on healthcare denial management and provide the best denial management services to the healthcare industry. The reason Medical Billing Companies are focused on medical billing denials because they have a wide range of tools and resources which help them to manage medical billing perfectly. In-House Medical Billing Staff will lack those resources which a Medical Billing Company can use to provide the Best Denial Management Services.

What is Denial in Medical Billing?

When it comes to the specific question “What is Denial in Medical Billing”, we need to cover up few details to answer this question. When a claim is submitted to the insurance company and successfully processed by the insurance company and EOB/ERA is released with the reason of denial with payment amount as $0.00 is called Denial in Medical Billing. Every denial code in medical billing is not considered Denial because some denial reason codes in medical billing don’t mean that claims can’t be processed or it’s a dead-end situation. The denial reason code in Medical Billing provides more information about the reason why it has been denied and how to fix the issue to get the claim reimbursement for the services provided by the healthcare professional.

Medical Billing AR Management

If you are using an Outsourced Medical Billing Company, then your medical practice AR (Account Receivable) Management should be the responsibility of Medical Billing Experts at Medical Billing Company. Generally, Medical Billing Companies have dedicated Denial Management Experts on their team who are specialized to work on denial management to get the claims paid.

Denial Management for In-House Medical Biller

If you are using an in-house medical biller then you must rely on Denial Management Strategy to ensure that your medical claims are being followed up properly with a certain interval of time. Medical Biller at your medical practice should have medical billing denial codes and reasons to match the claims whenever receive any denial to take appropriate action. Medical billing denial codes and reasons help your Medical Biller to work effectively on the denials received from the insurance company.

What is Denial Management in Healthcare?

Denial Management has a lot to do with claims-specific scenarios and the way how it’s being submitted to the insurance company. Medical Billing Companies tend to have a certain procedure in place to ensure that they do the Pre-Submission Claim Audit to ensure the claimed accuracy and then submit the claim. But just in case the claim is denied, they must work on healthcare denial management to ensure the right action is taken. To get a specific idea about the Medical billing denial codes and reasons we need to look further into the reason/remark code mentioned on the ERA or EOB to take further required action. Every insurance and claim scenario is different from another and Medical Billers has to rely on the information provided by the insurance on the remittance advice.

Need Help in Denial Management?

We at iCareBilling have been appreciated by our clients as “Top Rated Medical Billing Companies” and we have Expert Medical Billers to help our clients collect more from insurances and patients. If you need help, Contact Us today and talk to a Medical Billing Specialist to discuss your needs and find the right medical billing solutions.

8 Ways on How to Collect Deductibles from Patients

Often healthcare providers think about the ways on how to collect deductibles from patients. You must have a proper procedure in place to help you collecting copays and deductibles from patients in an efficient way. Collecting patient deductibles can be challenging when you do not know the insurance annual deductible. In the situation of not having a mechanism to check the eligibility and benefits verification, it often led to a question when should copayments and deductibles be collected from patients?

Medical Billing Companies often put their efforts on healthcare claims insurance collections, but they do not have a mechanism to actively follow up on patient collection. This creates an important need for good practice management software comes in that has certain features to not only support Medical Billing tasks but also could focus on collecting the balances from patients. Having the best medical billing company by your side helps you to improve healthcare practices workflow and align your medical billing and collection process to maximize cash flow and improve collection.

1. Inform Patients about their Deductible at the Beginning of the Year

It’s important for the healthcare practice staff members to have knowledge that when the new year start, there would be higher chances that the patient insurance plan’s deductible has not been met. Annual deductible plans are being renewed at the start of the new year so the staff member should share this information with patients who are not up to date with insurance policies. This will help patients to know their financial responsibility in advance rather than getting bills for deductible and getting surprised about that. Early access to information helps them to plan ahead on how to pay the deductible.

2. Verify Patient Plan Benefits Before Date of Service

Medical Billing Software allows you to check the patient benefits online to verify the plan benefits, total deductible, how much deductible has been met or paid by the patient, and remaining amount as well as out of pocket maximum. These details help you to inform patients about their coverage benefits so they know that they have to pay upfront or make a commitment to pay later but one way or other, the patient would have to pay the cost. This helps them to get mentally ready and manage their finances effectively.

3. Inform Patients about their Estimated Upfront Medical Bill Cost

Helping your patient to calculate the estimated cost of medical illness and the cost they could end up paying after their healthcare claim is processed by the insurance company would help you in collecting copay and deductibles from patients. Collecting deductibles from patients is more like having a transparent and genuine conversation with clients about their financial responsibility.

4. Collect Deductibles from Patient at the Date of Service

If you ask, when should copayments and deductibles be collected from the patient? the right answer should be at the time of service. Collecting patient deductibles at the front desk when the patient visits your office help you to save time, improve the cash flow of your practice and reduce the cost of patient statement mailing cost or e-statement cost or further medical practice overhead cost such as engaging your practice staff member to call patients for the follow-up. This would also help you to improve your overall medical billing and collection process to get increased revenue.

5. Make Healthcare Deductible SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for Collections

Making a policy for not only the deductible but for other patient responsibilities such as copayment, coinsurance, non-covered services under the patient’s plan, and tapping on the out-of-pocket maximum helps you to be more organized. Healthcare practices that have the standard procedure and having that shared with patients through the website or other media help your patient go on a procedure to make regular payment without any delay and making any excuses.

6. Offer Convenience of Payment

In an effort of collecting copays and deductibles from patients, you must offer the most convenient way to the patients so they can find it easy to make a payment. If patients find it difficult to make payment through regular checks mailing out, it would be hard for them to spare some time for this task. Your healthcare practice should have payment integration with leading payment gateways and offer multiple ways to make a payment.

7. Provide Flexible Patient Payment Plans

When thinking about the ways of collecting deductibles from patients, you must think like a patient. Some patients cannot pay the whole amount at once and they need a flexible payment plan to make all the payments. Your healthcare practice should have a policy on how to collect deductible from patient and offer your patients more flexibility so they can find it easy and not a financial burden on their paychecks.

8. Educate Patients about Healthcare & Medical Bills and their Responsibilities.

Use your newsletter and blog post to share insight about when should copayments and deductibles be collected from patients by the healthcare offices. When your patient will have more relevant information about the process, their patient plan, your practice SOPs about collecting patient deductibles they will be more responsive, and you will get your patient payments more frequently.

Looking for Best Medical Billing Companies?

If you need Best Medical Billing Services for your healthcare practice, Contact Us today and talk to a Medical Billing Specialist about your needs. We can help you to find an innovative way to choose the Best Medical Billing Solution for your practice to thrive in your business career.

6 Ways to Improve Patient Payment Collections

Working to improve patient payment collections is equally important as increasing insurance collections by having a mindful team of Expert Medical Billers on your side. Improving patient collections at healthcare practices has a significant impact on practice profitability. However, some physicians ignore the fact that they must realign their office workflow to achieve maximum payment collections from insurances and patients. In Medical Billing and Collections Process patient payment collection is the first step to start working with office workflow. It starts from scheduling a patient appointment, identifies their co-pay, co-insurance, and out-of-pocket maximum, and collect the payment upfront.

Some practices have different goals in terms of achieving the highest revenue and it differs from practices to specialties as well as the vision of the healthcare practice owner. Here are the key points to make which can help you to be more successful and profitable in your healthcare practice business.

Insurance Benefits Verification at the Time of Appointment

As soon as the patient calls to schedule the appointment, you should have the ability to check the patient’s eligibility and have this in the documentation. You must know the patient’s plan limitations, copay, coinsurance, deductible, out-of-pocket maximum, and in case of a specialist, the specialist copay as well.

Taking Patient Payment at Front-Desk

Most Practice Management Software can allow healthcare provider staff to check patient eligibility on run-time. If you do not use the industry-standardized Healthcare Practice Management System, you can look at the patient’s insurance card to get the information about copay, coinsurance, deductible, and other plan level details along with eligibility effective and termination date.

Offering the Different Payment Processing Solutions

When we talk about payment processing, we think everyone would be comfortable with Credit Card but that is not true. Some patients prefer to go by Credit Card or Debit Card and in some cases, they would like to use the paper check. Even in some cases, they directly want to go on a patient payment plan to pay in the installments. You need to ensure that your Practice Management System and overall Healthcare Management Workflow have the ability to accept different payment sources.

Improved Patient Payment Collection Procedure

Having a well-defined patient payment collection procedure in place helps you in improving patient collections, and to avoid unnecessary follow-ups, sending too early or too late statements, or relying on manual follow-up. That is the reason that in healthcare business process automation is becoming the booming business market. Your Medical Billing Services Provider should have the ability to send frequent paper statements, e-statements, reminder text messages, and automated IVR Calls for the balance due to ensure the maximum collection.

Review Patient Payment A/R Reports

To work on improving patient collections ou must generate systematic reports to look at the pending account receivable reports on patients’ end and see how long they have been pending. Have a Top Ranked Medical Billing Company by your side to help you provide dynamic reports. It will help you to view the different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to make further decisions about outstanding balances.

Patient Payment Final Settlement:

As a healthcare provider, you can offer your patients a lump sum amount as a final settlement for their all due balances to clear the pending bills. This strategy helps the healthcare providers to improve patient collections from the bad debt instead of writing this off completely. You need to consider this option before writing off the patient old outstanding balances.

Hire a Professional Medical Billing Company

We deeply understand that healthcare providers are trained for years to provide the best care to their patients and they should not be engaged in the medical billing and collections process to ruin their potential. You should look for a Top Rated Medical Billing Company that can help you to improve your payment collection.

Medical Billing Services Help Available

We at iCareBilling helping many healthcare providers to improve their overall collections. We help the healthcare practices to improve their current workflow to achieve the highest insurance & patient payment collection. Contact us today and talk to Medical Billing Specialist to help you find a Medical Billing Solution for your practice.