Even before COVID-19 turned the economics of healthcare upside down, managing the business side of health systems and physician groups was becoming increasingly complex. With the onset of today’s challenges, your administrative staff and medical billing experts are stretched to the limits of their time and capabilities – while being expected to stay current with billing and coding guidelines.
The Office of Inspector General has identified coding and billing practices as one of four potential risk areas for physicians, who are held responsible for either knowing the guidelines or employing a medical billing expert who does.
Why does this matter? Without efficient and accurate billing, your practice may be losing millions of dollars in earned revenue. Worse, your organization increases its risk of a CMS audit, which can result in additional costly compliance penalties.
Coding is essential to billing accuracy and complete revenue capture. Currently, there are more than 68,000 ICD codes for medical conditions and 10,000 CPT codes for medical services. These classification systems are updated regularly – representing a daunting amount of information to absorb and process. This is where a top-notch medical billing expert is needed.
To capture services properly and be reimbursed accurately, there must be a symbiotic relationship between providers and medical billing staff. Both need to be well-versed and diligent in medical coding. Ingenious Med’s charge capture tool is designed to assist both ends of the coding process to optimize accuracy and revenue capture.
Ensuring full reimbursement for services requires that physicians accurately and completely document the patient’s primary condition or procedure, co-morbidities and more. Ideally, that information is captured during or immediately following care, when the services delivered are fresh in the clinician’s mind.
Unfortunately, undercoding at the point of care is not uncommon, for reasons such as time constraints, cumbersome charge capture tools and a lack of training. Ingenious Med’s user-friendly tool offers mobile charge capture technology designed to make it easier for clinicians to select the correct ICD-10 and CPT codes and complete documentation. With few clicks and little manual data entry, our superior user experience makes it easier for clinicians to submit accurate data.
When billing, staff must complete the documentation process by identifying missing or inaccurately coded services. Tracking down physicians for clarification and making corrections can take as much as 25 percent of their time.
Indeed.com currently lists more than 65,000 open positions across the U.S. for billing and coding experts, and at least as many open jobs for other medical office administrative positions. With so many unfilled positions, staff often have limited training or knowledge of medical billing and coding, especially for specialties and subspecialties. Combined with incomplete and inaccurate documentation by clinicians, that can increase a practice’s risk of audits and/or significant revenue losses. The Ingenious Med® application makes it easy for physicians to accurately and completely code for services rendered at the point of care to ensure that your organization optimally captures revenues, achieves near real-time reporting and manages your medical billing efficiently and accurately.
Reflecting more than 20 years of medical billing and coding experience, our application is continuously updated with input from medical billing experts and revenue cycle specialists. Our technology solves real-world problems with solutions that are intuitive and easy to implement, so overwhelmed clinicians and medical billing staff can work smarter. The Ingenious Med application also extends the reach of your EHR, enhancing coding and billing throughout the care delivery process.
To learn more about how Ingenious Med can help your staff and clinicians become medical billing experts, contact us at 770.799.0909 or visit ingeniousmed.com/demo.