You should be worried about being held liable in the event of an error committed by your chiropractic billing company, such as over-billing a patient. What’s even worse is that this kind of mistake could cost you a patient in addition to stirring up legal trouble and making your chiropractic clinic look unprofessional. Not to mention that this error will result in a heightened struggle against the insurance companies and reduced cash flow for your clinic.
Needless to say, the best protection against mayhem like this is choosing your billing company wisely. The whole point of hiring someone to take care of your clinic’s billing tasks is to free up time for patient care, after all, not take on legal battles. Just how can you tell which billing company offers the most reputable service while calculating the risk for human error?
Here are some tips for selecting the right billing company for your chiropractic clinic:
- Shared risk: Make sure the billing company pays up, too, if they make a mistake, rather than letting you take the fall all by yourself.
- Reduced risk: Look for strategies the company implements to reduce the risk of human error, such as:
- Early-error-detection: Processes that detect any errors as early as possible throughout the billing process since it is impossible to expect a 100 percent error-free performance.
- Automated system verification of claims: Straight-through processing: Claims with missing or wrong data are automatically sent back to the practice for correction before submission to the payers.
- Performance based rewards for competing billing teams: When several outsourced billing teams compete for new clients individual performance tends to improve, resulting in better service.
- Claims ticket tracking: Tracking all claims tickets, including any subsequent updates during the billing process, results in higher accountability due to increased transparency.
- Quality assurance process: Having a separate billing team selectively check samples of submitted claims and audit patient statement ensures that any errors the automated system might have missed are detected and corrected.
Ultimately, preparation is the best policy and it comes down to accepting that humans, including your chiropractic staff members as well as billing company employees, will make mistakes that need to be fixed. A reputable billing company should help you improve the profitability and cash flow of your chiropractic clinic by sharing and reducing your risks every step of the way.
One company that follows all of the above principles based on the belief that your success is their success is Genesis Chiropractic Software. They assign the best performing billing team to new clients, provide a transparent ticket tracking process, automated verification processes, and last but not least, quality assurance.