Is your cardiology billing department prepared for the 2009 coding changes? If not, it could cost your cardiology practice a great deal of money.

Seven to over ten percent of your practice’s revenue is being lost if your medical billing company is not systematically comparing your insurance payments to the amounts allowed in your payer contracts. Any competent medical insurance billing service should offer this feature as part of their standard service.

Intentional and systematic inefficiencies in the insurance companies’ medical reimbursement processes lead to inflated medical costs. Improved medical billing processes from providers and medical billing services can play a significant role in decreasing this component of healthcare cost.

One of the key advantages of billing outsourcing, when it is done correctly, is the clear alignment of incentives between the practice and the billing company.

Twenty Percent. This is how much of your practice or facility’s collections you are allowing payers to keep if you are not properly tracking and pursuing medical billing denials. This is a lot of money during the best of times, but particularly during tough economic times. Your practice needs an effective Revenue Cycle Denial Management system if you want to recapture this lost income.

No matter what technology you deploy or the strength of your process, superior medical billing ultimately relies upon a strong billing staff. There are four key elements to creating a world-class billing team:

A weak medical billing staff can undermine the best technology and billing processes. Medical Billing success requires great medical billing employees. Developing a strong medical billing team is a difficult, but worthwhile effort. Here is how to make it happen:

Almost half of hospitals senior executives responding to a recent Transunion survey reported a marked (between 6 and 10 percent) growth in bad debt over the past 18 months. Over 25% realized between 11 and 20 percent growth in this key metric.

Clean Claim Laws are currently in place in every state. The assistance provided by the laws ranges from states like South Dakota which has no economic penalty to Texas where the payer sometimes is required to pay billed charges

Submitting clean claims is critical to a strong medical billing process. A fundamental element of good process design is to catch problems as soon in the process as you can. Correcting a diagnosis error before a claim is submitted may take 5 minutes; correcting it after the claim has been denied will take well over an hour (and it will delay collections by 3o or more days).