Medical Billing Control Requires Powerful Denial Management
It has been accurately stated that you cannot manage what you do not measure. This is particularly true in the arena of medical billing denials. Without a strong Revenue Cycle Denial Management system in place you cannot properly manage this critical element of medical billing. If you are not managing your denials then you are most likely leaving more than 20% of your revenues uncollected.
Revenue Cycle Denial Management has become a universal and often abused term in medical billing. Some individuals use the term to describe a means of addressing claims denied for medical necessity. Others use the term to describe how some information is tracked for a specific payer, set of procedures or a place of service. Still others try to use it to describe what they do daily in the physician’s office.
Given all of this confusion, how do you find out if your medical billing company or medical billing department is utilizing proper denial management for your practice? A good start is to ask a few simple questions: What do they believe denial management entails? What metrics do they utilize to measure denial management success? How much have they increased your collections in the past 6 months through their denial management system?
A good denial management system is not simply about working denials, it is about systematically gathering the data required to eliminate denials. Working denials is like pumping water from your basement when a pipe bursts. Denial management is about fixing the pipe so you no longer need to pump water from the basement.
Fixing core denial problems and increasing collections requires keeping track of, understanding the magnitude of, and reporting on every claim that is denied by a payer. Tracking all denial across all payers is critical. The proper denial management system provides the data required to stop the root cause of problems and significantly increase the rate of first claim submission acceptance. If your practice is not measuring this level of detail then money, significant money, is being lost in the flood of denied claims pouring into your practice.
What is typically missing from troubled billing operations is the lack of the management-reporting expertise needed to extract the data in a concise and meaningful way coupled with a lack of methodical, measured billing process needed to correct mistakes. A comprehensive Revenue Cycle Denial Management system has two main purposes. The first purpose is to provide feedback on why claims are denying and how many claims are not being paid on the first submission to the respective payers. The second is to fix these issues. Effective Revenue Cycle Denial Management software databases must be designed to track, quantify, and report on all denials for all payers.
Your denial management system must 1) Track all denials by payer; 2) Report on the reason for the denials and the number of claims denied for each reason; and 3) Allow for in depth analysis and comparison across payers to identify important trends. Once these capabilities are in place, the medical billing specialists can create targeted process changes and claim edits/rules that will fix systemic billing issues and increase collections.
Payers that are chronic violators are pursued to resolve how and when they intend to process and pay outstanding claims. If the issues persist, there may be grounds to charge penalties stipulated by the Clean Claim Law. Only by quantifying and analyzing the problem can a medical billing team discover how to improve on the process.
As previously mentioned, an effective denial management system is critical for your practice if you want to improve your medical billing and hasten your collections. Implementation of the proper system can easily increase collections by more than 10% and could even exceed a 20% increase in collections.
Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II