Electronic Health Reporter

The rise of this decade has brought new and complicated challenges that are accompanied by some other problems that left unresolved during the last decade. 2020 has come up with some unprecedented and unpredictable host of challenges such as global medical emergency because of the vast exposure of COVID-19 making its way from China to the US in a few days.

This global crisis has thrust upon a lot of burden on the medical practitioners, especially on physicians. In a physician’s office or any healthcare center, it has increased burden on both front-end and back-end departments of the healthcare centers and both seem to be in turmoil in such circumstances. Along, with these challenges physicians have to also suffer from the financial crisis due to changing rules and policies for physician billing services. It is the hardest challenge for physicians to align their financial policies with respect to the real-time changes in medical coding and physician medical billing services.

In this article, I have mentioned the following top 10 challenges for physician billing services that are quite difficult to encounter;

Excessive Administrative Burden

It has always been a cumbersome task for the physicians to handle the burden of excessive stress of managing both patients and physician medical billing services. This is not a new issue and physicians have been facing this issue all around America for decades. No matter their association with the private or public practice, no matter if they are practicing individually or on a large-scale healthcare center, they have to improvise administrative responsibilities.

However, COVID-19 has made this situation more difficult. It is becoming difficult for physicians to consistently train their employees that work for their physician billing services. Government and insurance companies are introducing new payment policies on a daily basis. Hence, uneducated and insufficiently trained staff can result in damaging results. It will also impact the efficiency of physicians while delivering patient care services.

 More Claim Denials

Physicians are suffering from a great revenue loss due to more number of claim denials in 2020. It takes a lot of their energy and efforts to review subtle details and changing regulations for documentation prior to claim submission. Without Evaluation and Management services providers it is very difficult to drive payments without facing the problems of payment denials, poor reimbursements, and inefficient payment schedule.

Stay Ahead In the Competition

In this age of capitalism, healthcare service is also treated as a commodity and healthcare industry as a market with increased competition than ever. The availability of innumerable options of availing healthcare services from different providers makes the physicians become more complicated as they have to meet the demands of increasing number of patients. In this environment of increased competition, physicians require innovative solutions for physician billing services. In this way, they have to work hard on keeping up with technology and trends of the healthcare providers at the market costs.

Inefficient EHR

An ineffective and inefficient EHR interface not only creates complications for the physicians but also poses serious threats to the patients. It is also accompanied by communication gap between patients and physicians that can result in the misunderstanding between physicians and their patients and hence increases their probability of getting burnout. The primary objective to implement an EHR in medical practices was to make the process streamlined. However, if you implement such as EHR in your existing system that has poor interface and insufficient features to reduce the complications then it will make your system inefficient. Therefore, physicians need to carefully research the physician medical billing company that provides the best solutions for physician billing services.

The Threat of facing a Lawsuit

It is common for most of the practitioners to remain in a constant threat of getting sued by a lawsuit in case of medical malpractice or any other unresolvable complaint by the patients. It happens due to the involvement of physicians in so many tasks parallelly and their attention being diverted into several tasks. Therefore, they should acquire the assistance of an outsource physician billing company that can help them to stay abreast of the medical billing and coding guidelines, provide complete medical audit and follow up wit Aging A/R. Hence, physicians converge their attention to their main responisbility_ providing quality care services.

Dealing Patients with Chronic Diseases

It has also become difficult for physicians to deal with patients who are suffering from chronic conditions. Physicians have just limited equipment and human resources who can fulfill the responsibility of taking care of a huge number of patients. It can also result in omitting out important details that are essential for the claim submission process.

Safeguard Patient’s Data

HIPAA has applied strict rules for the protection of patient’s data. It is essential for physicians to also acquire protective solutions for physician billing services that can also ensure that all safeguards are implemented for cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is one of the main threats to the healthcare industry in 2020. According to a recent study, it has been revealed that the private information of a patient is more valuable in the black market than any other information. Even if physicians tend to hand over patient’s private to an outsource medical billing company, they should make sure that the company is HIPAA compliant. Physicians should take care of the security measures in every corner of their practice.

Negotiation of Contracts

It is the most important aspect of physician billing services. Most of the physicians who have their in-house medical billing department find it challenging to negotiate contracts with payers due to the lack of useful equipment and human resources. Therefore, they should opt for the physician billing services offered by industry experts in order to retain the sustainability of their financial accounts.

The Hiring of Experienced Staff

Most of the physicians have handed their in-house medical billing department to uncertified and unqualified medical billers. They train and educate their staff by themselves. However, due to the excessive burden, now physicians are finding it hard to consistently train their staff about the ongoing changes in the medical billing and coding policies. Although, an expert medical billing company can effectively overcome these challenges as they have dedicated resources to pursue potentially profitable physician billing services.

Partner with a professional medical billing company that can help you get out of the dilemma. Request a free demo to get the optimized results from supportive, completely transparent and custom-made physician billing services.