Technology Will Not Save You From Bad Medical Billing Employees
No matter what technology you deploy or the strength of your process, superior medical billing ultimately relies upon a strong billing staff. There are four key elements to creating a world-class billing team:
1) Deploy a systematic approach to and dedicated resources for obtaining and developing strong employees:
The leading billing organizations recruit the best staff. A dedicated, specialized HR team evaluates applicants-applicants must pass a proprietary billing testing process assessing both skill and will. This process shouldn’t be different from the recruiting process of a Fortune 500 organization.
The leading billing organizations train to develop desired quality. Junior staff members must pass demanding training programs-junior team members are developed into billers, capable of following the measured and monitored billing process. In addition, staff is trained throughout the year in latest payer rules, follow-up techniques and compliance guidelines. A dedicated Compliance Officer is responsible for all additional HIPAA and OIG training.
If you do not remove weak performers from your team they will demoralize the entire group and will bring most people down to their level of performance. It is. Unfortunately true, that on bad apple can spoil the bunch. Each year remove the weakest members of the team based upon clear performance metrics.
2) Focus your team members: The best medical billing processes are designed to allow individuals to specialize in specific areas such as charge posting, insurance follow-up or payment posting. Such specialization allows the individuals to become true experts capable of spotting issues quickly that billers spending their time performing multiple tasks might miss.
3) Invest heavily in analytical efforts: Continuous improvement of the billing process and the billing team requires significant and on-going analytical efforts. By measuring key factors about both payers and the billing process, a billing group can speed up collections, lower denials and lower the cost of the billing process.
4) Compensate your medical billing specialists based upon performance, not effort: Your billing department should succeed when the practice succeeds. Many good billing systems have been undermined by a compensation approach that does not give the medical billing team the proper motivation to doggedly and efficiently pursue the practice’s claims. Remember to insure the compensation system falls with the OIG’s guidelines.
Utilizing these concepts will allow you to assemble and grow a medical billing team that will be capable of utilizing a great medical billing process to deliver powerful results.
Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II
Tags: Advice, Ask an Expert, Business, Business and finance, Business services, Business to business, Consulting, Entrepreneurship, How to, Medical billing, Medical billing services, Medical services, Outsourcing, Small Business