Identifying And Eliminating Losses
Physical therapists aren’t generally trained in the intricacies of compliance law pertaining to billing practices of a physical therapy practice. They may get a broad idea, but until actual operations take place, it’s not really possible to accurately communicate the truth.
Multiple patients from every walk of life with multiple insurance types will regularly represent your clientele. Payments of the immediate, deferred, pro-rated, discounted, and financed variety will become necessary. For legal and categorization purposes, these will each require coding. Since injuries and genetic defects don’t follow textbooks, coding can be difficult.
Certain activities may seem to be one code, but a recent ruling may mean they’re actually another. Remaining up-to-date is a fight in and of itself; proper categorization is legitimately complicated. If that weren’t enough, sometimes internal systems mix up contact information because those systems aren’t consolidated properly. A bill may never arrive at a client’s home.
Avoiding collections and lost revenue from payments that never come through is necessary for successful business operations. While there’s a certain percentage of costs you are going to lose, that percentage can be curtailed by management software designed to simplify and expedite the process.
Additionally, the right software scans for compliance and notifies users of upgrades when they become available. Notification for code changes or transitions will also help PT practices remain current with legal regulations. The last thing you need is for an audit to broadside you because a well-meaning physical therapist on your team had been marking the wrong code.
A Cutting-Edge Software Platform
According to BMSPracticeSolutions.com, a provider of cutting edge physical therapy billing service management software, their solutions can: “…increase your net collections…” because their services “…improve therapist coding and documentation…[so] your physical therapists will document more accurately, better account[ing] for their patient care time.”
This reduces the chances of an audit, while increasing the successful billing of your practice. In this way the right software more than pays for itself. It’s easy to see why many PT practices are adopting these solutions to their regular operational protocols. They allow a profitable competitive edge through increased influx of completed bills.
Technological innovation is simplifying what was previously a hassle that could require an entire department. A thousand patients and their complete profiles can be kept in a thumb-drive. That’s an entire community. Before, that much filing would take up an entire room, if not a full storey of the practice building.
When programs can be designed and successfully implemented that do the heavy sifting, the compliance checking, and the information confirmation for you, it’s additionally a huge time saver. Consider some of the continuously shifting legal requirements that these programs can parse through instantaneously.
There are Medicare regulations, HIPAA privacy and security regulations, general security protocols, the correct coding initiative, and elucidation of private insurance payer policies.
Even if you knew exactly where to reference that information professionally, the time it would take you to type it in and do a search is hundreds of times greater than today’s software solutions. If you had to do six searches each averaging twenty seconds, that’s two minutes.
In the same time, you could be digitally done with the paperwork through today’s software.
If you want to streamline the operations of your medical practice, finding solutions of this kind which simplify areas of operations where losses accrue is a great way to do so.
Technological innovations increase on themselves in a way that’s statistically predictable—just check out Moore’s Law. Remaining abreast of them is integral to profitability.