Got Your 2009 Medical Billing Resolutions Ready
We are fast approaching the end of January and the point in the New Year when the majority of people’s New Year’s resolutions have already failed. This is, however, the time for renewed efforts to focus one’s resources on achieving the desired goal. There are two keys to reaching your goals:
1. View your failures (i.e., I have not flossed in two days) as minor set backs and not as utter failure (i.e., I might as well start saving for dentures); and
2. Create a series of intermediate goals between where you are and where you want to be (i.e., instead of “I will lose 50 pounds this year” focus on “I will lose 1 pound each week”).
So, this is interesting, but how does it apply to medical billing? Well, if you keep these ideas in mind you can use them to achieve lofty improvements in medical billing performance. How? Start with a powerful and straight forward goal: Make sure your claims are clean before you submit them. This will help your medical billing in several ways:
- You can only achieve it by having a laser focus on the front end elements of medical billing. This is where the medical billing “game” is won or lost;
- This goal can be easily broken down into smaller goals such as “I will improve my acceptance rate by 2% per month or I will implement a claim scrubber by the end of March;
- This goal has many ways in which failure provides powerful learning opportunities. You can set aside time to analyze rejected claims to determine the source of the rejection and then focus on eliminating the problem area.
- Technology can be a powerful ally in achieving this goal. The use of coding tools, automated demographic verification tools and scrubbing claims will eliminate many sources of up-front errors that lead to claim rejections.
Use the end of January as the time for a more informed New Year’s resolution for your medical practice. Today is the time for you to:
- Measure your current performance level;
- Write down a powerful and meaningful performance improvement goal (my practice will have over 95% of its claims accepted on the initial transmission);
- Create a “goal ladder” where each rung of the ladder represents an incremental, achievable goal on the way toward your ultimate goal. For instance your may set incremental goals of improving your clean claim performance by 1 percent each month; and
- Create a plan for how you will learn from rejected claims.
This approach and focus can allow your medical billing efforts to reach new standards of excellence in 2009.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II
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