GeBBS Healthcare Blog

The data is clear – policymakers are making every effort to reduce healthcare costs, particularly as states struggle with significant budget deficits across the country. To do this, many state governments have elected to outsource the management of Medicaid and Medicare programs to managed care companies.  According to Modern Healthcare, 34% of Medicare beneficiaries are now enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan, which is administered by a private payer. Similarly, 77% of Medicaid beneficiaries are enrolled in some form of managed care plan.

Balancing the competitive landscape that comes with physician practice consolidation combined with population health and the shift to value-based care is a lot to consider for busy hospital physician practices.  Add in the constant changes in regulatory guidelines, enhancing the patient experience and most importantly – a continued focus on quality and safety and most hospital administrators have little resources left to focus on improving the revenue cycle.

With cash flows declining, margins shrinking, and bad debt on the rise, it's more important than ever for healthcare providers to maintain a steady stream of income. If your organization has not implemented an end-to-end, comprehensive best practices revenue cycle management (RCM) solution, it is time to do it! You don’t have to add staff; just call on an experienced outsourcing firm with 10+ years of RCM experience with expertise in multi-specialty collections and billing. They will be able to deliver an all-inclusive RCM solution that follows industry-standard key performance metrics to measure success and integrate best practices, so that you get the value of their proven experience and expertise.

With the growing number of high deductible insurance plans and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), patients are now responsible for up to 35 percent of their healthcare delivery costs. Here are some staggering facts from MGMA and McKinsey & Company:

The amounts for insurance deductibles continue to grow each year and there is no end in sight to these increases. With more and more patients opting for high deductible, low premium commercial health insurance policies, and the growing usage from the Affordable Care Act (ACA), providers must seek ways to collect these large deductible amounts at the point of care, using an integrated approach that includes call centers and comprehensive end-to-end revenue cycle management, coupled with compassionate collection training.

The world did not come to an end on October 1, 2015. With the start of ICD-10, healthcare professionals anticipated an overall reduction in productivity of their billing staff. In a pre-October 1 survey, 94% of respondents indicated that they expected increased denials, but only 30% had done any work toward solving the problem. 

If you are one of these, you are suggested to begin immediately to improve your denial management processes and your ICD-10 coding. Most providers, payers, and even CMS expect there will be a noticeable increase in the coding denial ratios, which currently range between 15-20%, and may actually double. Though, by design, ICD-10 is expected to reduce the denial rates; in the short term there is bound to be reduced collections, higher denial ratios, and lower productivity.

Credit balances are unavoidable and time-consuming. However, by law, they must be resolved. This activity does not have to be difficult even for already over-worked billing staffs. Professional outsourcing services are available to help with this growing challenge.

These services can be customized to fit into your specific workflow and increase your staff’s productivity, allowing you to increase the volume of accounts resolved on a daily basis, without hiring extra FTEs.

There are professional outsource companies that specialize in enhancing the financial performance of your revenue cycle management and related processes. They act as your partner to work within your legacy billing systems to research accounts in credit status, determine the root causes of the credit, and take appropriate corrective actions to resolve your credit balances. They leverage their healthcare expertise, technology, and qualified personnel resources. There is no capital outlay required.

Incorrect adjustments, erroneous credits, and misuse of debit codes make the credit balance task challenging without precision. 

In contrast, professional outsource analysts are diligent and well-trained to ensure outstanding credit balances are accurately resolved in an expeditious manner. Their services are highly client-centric. They understand a professional and cooperative environment is the key to resolving credit balances, many of which become account corrections, as opposed to actual refunds.

In today’s healthcare environment, credit balances are commonplace. The healthcare industry has a high incidence of credit balances due to multiple parties paying claims. The way that various information technology (IT) systems operate also creates credit balances.

Each provider must determine its credit balance strategy -- implement an internal program, which usually requires adding staff; outsourcing this work; or ignoring it. This last option is not optimal or realistic, given penalties for failure to comply with regulations on both the state and federal levels can be significant.

The common result is that healthcare providers do not want to add staff, if it can be avoided, and credit balance resolution provides a substantive distraction from the staff’s primary billing and collection focus. Among the reasons for this, is the provider belief that it’s painful to pay staff members to “give money away.” And, once behind in their credit balance resolution work, it is very difficult to catch up.

This leaves as the best alternative for handling credit balance resolutions – outsourcing! Following are the six top benefits and results for outsourcing your credit balance work:

Credit balances are simply a part of everyday life in the delivery of healthcare services. Unresolved credit balance accounts can distort the profitability of a healthcare facility and foster financial risks. Researching and correcting posting errors, duplicate payments, overpayments, and misapplied credits are not only time consuming, but also expensive. However, failure to address these credit balances in a timely manner may result in missed billing opportunities, and when associated with government payers, may also bring compliance risks and penalties. Following are 10 best practices to help you with your credit balance resolutions:

The introduction several years ago of the ERA (Electronic Remittance Advice) created a quantum leap in the healthcare billing arena by providing an improvement to the traditional, paper-based EOBs. Astonishingly, many providers have not taken advantage of this revolutionary change. It has been estimated that even today only 46 percent of the claims are processed electronically, while the remaining 54% claims are processed in the traditional paper-based method. However, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandated that all healthcare plans adopt and support ERA operating rules before January 1, 2014.