Medical billing is a complex process. It consists of many steps, each of which plays an important role in streamlining your revenue cycle process. Therefore, paying attention to each of the steps of the complete process can greatly reduce issues. Payment posting is an important cog in the wheel. It plays an important role in making the medical billing process smooth and effective. The combined effect of billing and posting can help your practice increase profits. Payment posting also helps you identify opportunities to increase revenue. Therefore, it is important to have a precise payment posting process in place and keep things on the right flow.
If you have a great team of payment posters, you will be able to identify trends behind denials, non-covered services, and prior authorizations with great efficiency. This is primarily because the team will be able to move issues up the chain to the concerned department and nip problems in the bud.
Most providers follow the best practices to keep their insurance payment posting process on track. However, following the best practices is not an end in itself. It is important for providers to evaluate the process regularly to ensure the process is going well.
Best Payment Posting Practices to Keep your Billing Process Efficient
Mapping and reconciling EOB and ERA posting. Ensure that both the figures match at the end of the day.
Report all denials to the concerned team. This will ensure timely corrections and re-submission to payers.
Be prompt in moving patient balances to patient’s responsibility. This will ensure faster recovery of patient dues.
Process adjustments and write-offs promptly. Flag all unusual adjustments made during payment processing. Keep your staff posted on trends in denials, prior authorizations, non-covered services, co-payment issues at front office.
How to Evaluate Payment Posting in RCM
If you get your payments on time, it doesn’t mean things will be hunky dory throughout. It doesn’t take much for your process to go kaput. And this may happen much before you realize. Therefore, to avoid such a possibility, you must evaluate your payment posting on a routine basis. So, how to go about? Mentioned below are few best ways:
Evaluate Staff
Having skilled and adequate resources is the key to proper payment posting. Many providers try to do more with less. This is an ideal recipe for disaster. Your staff levels should be based on volume of work. If not, you will be forcing your staff to bite more than they can chew. This leads to all sorts of mistakes.
It’s equally important to have experienced staff for your payment posting process. This will ensure close to hundred percent accuracy and productivity. The best way to hire the right staff is to check references. Also, have a proper process and evolving to evaluate them.
Sometimes, maintaining adequate staff, or finding the right people can be a challenge. Besides, you may have to contend with problem like attrition, changing payer requirements, etc. All of these introduce a lot of uncertainties to the process. The best way to eliminate these uncertainties is to outsource payment posting services.
Keep an Eye on the Process
The effectiveness of your payment posting process also depends on fair practices. Many providers, have to deal with issues such as hiding unprocessed checks. This happens mostly when the staff is overworked or incompetent. A good way to stop this from happening is by having proper staffing distribution. This way you can assign separate duties to separate staff and create a hierarchy for accountability within the team.
Another proven way is to have a quality control team in place. The team must carry out regular and random checks of every activity associated with posting. This will keep posters on their toes and remove chances of complacency.
If this is too much of a requirement for you, outsourcing can be the best option. Third-party vendors have the right staff, process and quality control mechanism to stop errors from creeping in.
Watch your write-offs
It always pays to post payments on a line-item basis rather than bulk posting. Your billing process must be designed along this practice. This will ensure your posters are always in a position to raise concerns and questions on time. There also has to be an established way to enter write-offs. You must have specific write-off codes and your employees must be properly trained on how to use them. The best practice is to keep them informed on the payment amount so that they can flag and follow up in case of any variances.
A good practice is to audit payment poster performance review every quarter. Evaluate write-offs to know if your posters are not writing off money by mistake. This will bring a lot of discipline into the process and eliminate chances of error.
Valuing Time
It makes complete business sense to get payments posted and deposited quickly. A delay can lead to confusion like sending bills to a patient when the patient has already settled the payment. This slows down your process and even earns you a bad name.
One way to make your payment posting process time efficient is to leverage technology. Availing electronic payment remittance and funds transfer can keep the process simpler. This enables payments getting posted directly to the billing system or to the providers bank account. Either way, it makes the job a lot easier for your posters.
Conclusion
Keeping the payment posting process on track is a continuous challenge. The best way to meet this challenge is to carry out end-to-end evaluation of every aspect of payment posting on a routine basis. Make audit an integral part of the process. The audit must look into the nitty gritty of the process such as capturing payments and remittances, mapping remittances and payments, identifying short payments, matching open A/R invoice and managing exceptions. And most importantly, it should be carried out on a random basis.
Who We Are and What Makes Us an Expert?
This article is brought to you by MedBilling Experts a specialized medical back-office support service provider. We provide comprehensive back-office support services to US-based healthcare practices. This includes all aspects of revenue cycle management. One of the services we specialize in is payment posting. Our services have helped our clients speed up denial management, keep track of changing policies, and get specialized access to experienced resources. Get in touch with us now to know more about our payment posting services.
