Running a successful lab business is undoubtedly a difficult task. However, in order to maintain the smooth functioning of your business, optimization of the laboratory billing services is an efficient as well as effective way.
Therefore, lab technicians should never ignore the importance of non-medical obligations i.e lab billing and coding services. Because it is the only way to ensure the long term financial stability of your practice.
In this challenging era, healthcare providers are constantly facing financial challenges in terms of claim denials, revenue leakage, and cash flow disruption. Therefore, keeping a close eye on the financial matters of your laboratory practice is the key to keeping a business in existence.
So, lab billing is a vital factor in the healthcare practice that involves, medical coding, charge entry, submission of insurance claims, following up on, denial management, payment postings and collections management. This process is crucial to collect maximum revenue for the laboratory services you rendered.
Similarly, lab billers act as the fiscal waypoint between the patients, lab technicians, and payers. They are responsible to keep a close eye on the medical claims to ensure streamlined cash flow.
But with the rising documentation requirements, changing billing and coding guidelines, it has become very difficult for lab practitioners to keep their RCM process optimized.
Because the ever-changing healthcare reforms have made the laboratory billing services more complicated than ever before. But with the implementation of the following strategies, you can keep your revenue cycle management on the right track.
1. Streamline Documentation Process
Clinical documentation is the key to successful lab billing services. So, in order to boost the accuracy of medical claims, you should make sure that front desk information is accurate and complete.
Having an accurate patient’s name, gender, work information, date of birth, phone number and address is a critical part of the data collection process. Lab billers use this information to prepare and file medical claims. Therefore, you should hire highly trained registration staff for this responsibility.
Moreover, in order to prevent the claim denials from the revenue collections management, lab technicians should implement automatic solutions for the documentation process. They should stop using orthodox methods i.e. manual paper filing. Because there is always the chance of human errors in such methods,
As documentation is the most crucial part of laboratory billing services, healthcare providers should adopt innovative ways to enhance their efficiency. You can remove these errors with the help of automatic solutions.
For example, they should integrate Electronic Health Records (EHR) into their existing systems. Because such advanced solutions not only decrease the chances of errors but also the data entry burden of your administrative staff. EHR solution also increases the protection of your highly confidential healthcare information.
As a result, you can ensure accurate information flow in the entire lab billing and coding process. Which helps you to run your business operations smoothly.
2. Avoid Coding Errors
The maximum reimbursements are highly dependent on the accurate set of medical codes. It is the process of translating a patient’s diagnosis, treatments, lab procedures and medical equipment into universal standard medical codes.
Medical coders extract this information from medical transcriptions and clinical documents. As medical coding is a complicated task, you should pay close attention to this procedure.
Because having coding errors cannot only slow down the laboratory billing services. But they can also cause federal penalties, heavy fines and imprisonment. Because coding errors such as; unbundling, upcoding, overcoding are considered as billing frauds.
However, if you are facing challenges to maintain the quality of the lab billing and coding in your lab premises, you should outsource lab medical billings services to a trusted third party.
By acquiring the assistance of outsourced coding experts, you don’t need to worry about the inconvenience related to wrong medical codes. Outsourced billing and coding experts have the extensive industry experience to ensure the accuracy of medical codes.
Moreover, they undergo constant training to stay up-to-date with the latest, deleted, or modified codes. They have in-depth knowledge about the ICD-10, which enables them to prepare medical claims with precise codes. That ultimately leads to the submission of clean claims and timely payments.
3. File Error-Free Claims
Laboratory practitioners lose a significant amount of revenue annually just because of the high percentage of claim denials. Therefore, it is the responsibility of healthcare providers to analyse the performance of the billers to make sure that the claims don’t contain any error.
Moreover, it is also the responsibility of lab billers to double-check the claims for the following mistakes, that can impact the laboratory billing services.
- Inaccurate/missing patient’s demographic information.
- Duplicate billing.
- Incorrect charge entry.
- The wrong set of medical codes.
- Late submission of medical claims.
However, it is also a fact that it has become very challenging for lab technicians to keep a balance between medical and non-medical obligations. Because the current pandemic has changed their work schedules entirely. As a result, they find it difficult to spend a considerable amount of time in the execution of their back-end tasks. Which can result in a financial crisis.
So, the best solution for efficient claims management is the outsourcing of lab medical billing services. Because off-shore billing companies hold a dedicated task force, that works hard to improve the profitability of your business.
They have comprehensive knowledge about all the parameters of preparing medical claims for maximum reimbursements. As a result, you can enjoy a healthy cash flow.
Furthermore, by outsourcing lab billing and coding services, healthcare providers get rid of the excessive administrative burden. Which enables them to mainly focus on providing standard aid to the patients. So, while keeping in mind all these benefits, the trend of outsourcing lab revenue cycle management services is getting pace across the world.
Laboratory Billings is a HIPAA compliant lab billing company in the United States. That has been providing reliable and custom-tailored laboratory billing services for more than 12 years. Click here to make the best deal for your lab business.
Rhydian Choi 
Kim Marks