Electronic Health Reporter

Guest post by Michelle Tohill, director of revenue cycle management, Bonafide Management Systems.

Keeping your practice fiscally healthy while you keep patients physically healthy can be tricky. Medical practices work hard, offices get busy, people need attention and everyone on staff does their best to provide the immediate goal of helping people feel well. But we also know that the only way you can continue to help your patients feel well is if you maintain a healthy business that sustains your overhead, staff costs and profit.

Your ability to collect maximum reimbursement can make or break your ability to provide excellent healthcare to your patients. Without steady, high levels of reimbursement your practice will likely suffer from low cash flow and minimal profitability. It can also impact your staffing choices, ranging from running with too few employees to underpaying critical staff members, resulting in poor care. The stress level in a practice that is under-reimbursed can damage your practice from the inside out.

One way to keep a practice in the black is to minimize claims denials — that’s not as easy as it sounds. A recent American Medical Association study sought to calculate just how much reworked claims can cost a practice and found that medical offices waste as much as $14,600 each year on correcting denied claims via appeals, trouble-shooting and countless phone inquiries.

But you already know all about this — your billing staff or outsourced billers probably tell you all the time how many obstacles stand in the way of successfully submitting claims.

Here are some tips to help you avoid leaving $14,600 on the table each year:

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