The healthcare industry is constantly changing, and urgent care is one of the domains that is seeing plenty of growth. This growth is because of many variables, including how efficiently health care services can be provided and in an affordable manner. In many instances, urgent care facilities have people waiting no more than half an hour for services, and visits do not tend to exceed an hour. But despite this efficiency, urgent care centers could miss out on a lot of money if mistakes are made during coding and billing. Here are some of the mistakes that could be made during urgent care billing and how those mistakes could be fixed.
Suboptimal Front Desk Procedures
The front desk is where the whole revenue cycle begins, and poor financial processes that start at this front desk can often lead to revenue loss. Co-payments should be collected whenever a patient arrives for a visit instead of waiting for the visit to be over, and any prior balances a patient has need to be gathered before any more services are offered to them. When you do not have good processes taking place at the front desk, practices can lose revenue, resulting in serious debt.
Therefore you have to have better financial processes in effect. Get your front desk staff trained in all the new processes you put in place and make sure they are retrained regularly to guarantee they know all of the current steps to follow.
Bad Contracts
When you set up contracts with payers, a legal agreement is established. This agreement involves the payer reimbursing your facility based on the fee schedule you put in place. Your facility also gets recognized as one of the in-network centers within their network directory. If you do not get contracts set up with any payers, you can’t accept insurance, which will make it much more of a challenge for your facility to bring in patients.
It is almost just as bad to get bad contracts negotiated as it is to have no contracts. This is because your facility won’t get reimbursed appropriately for whatever services you provide for patients. Reimbursement rates in your contract should be fair and go over all the services your urgent care center provides.
Insurance companies will always be adamant about lowering the expenses they have, so it is tough trying to raise reimbursement rates, but negotiating greater compensation from payers is a possibility. Getting the help of an experienced contractor can often be an effective solution for handling these negotiations.
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