Get an overview of which are the most common End of Year (EOY) reports that you need to improve your best practices analysis, learn how to have your medical practice ready for 2021 and set up goals for this new year.
On our first webinar of the year ("Out with the Old & In with the New: A 2020 Review"), Lucrezia Dunn, Operations Consultant at Health Prime, explained the importance of running End of Year (EOY) reports and how understanding them gets you an insight on your practice and how to improve it. Dunn also talked about how to get ready for 2021 and set some goals on your medical practice to succeed in this new year.
Understand the most common End of Year reports will help you improve your best practice analysis. This way, you will be able to know where your practice was last year and help you make plans to where you want your practice to go this 2021.
The most common End of Year (EOY) reports you want to pay attention to are:
Understand the importance of knowing when to let go of the old Accounts Receivable (A/R), learn how to create a plan for bad debt and get an insight on why refunds are important is important to set your practice for success.
Regarding the Accounts Receivable (by aging) report, this document allows you to see outstanding insurance claims based on aging totals. By knowing how much is still outstanding you can work and discuss with your Operations Consultant / Advisor to adjust your bad debt AR, set up an action plan and define some benchmarks.
“We pay special attention to our AR over 90 days because the older it is, the harder it is to collect. Our best practice benchmark for our AR over 90 days is benchmarked at 5%. If your account is not at 5% over 90 days, then consider cleaning house and keeping this tradition open for all the years to follow”, Dunn said.
How can I create a plan for bad debt?
There are some common scenarios which may also require Bad Debt Adjustments such as: claims older than 1-2 years, claims passed timely filling, claims with exhausted/failed appeal attempts, secondary balances where the primary EOB is not available and where it allows more than the secondary.
Why refunds are important?
Much time and effort are devoted to collecting information, creating charges, submitting claims, and collecting payments to have to spend additional time and energy trying to return this money. It seems like the task that's on the bottom of the list.
"Processing and returning credit balances is not optional but mandatory. It's not uncommon for providers to keep such overpayments until specifically asked to return them or until payers have withheld them from subsequent payments. Some providers may not only keep the overpayments but continue to bill inappropriately, creating even more overpayments”, Dunn said.
Some scenarios that cause credit balances are defined as: non covered services, in excess of the allowed amount for an identified covered service, in error, as duplicate payments and when another entity had primary responsibility for payment.
Credit balance procedures should include: review of the credit balance report with your billing team, decide if a project needs to be created in order yo have credits reviewed for accuracy, identification of both patient and insurance refunds, initiation of the refund process and delivery of supporting documentation, and more.
As you make your own New Year's resolutions, it's the perfect time to set new goals for your practice as well. Learn how to report to set goals and increase your revenue for 2021, stick to new reporting routines for this year, gather some ideas to assist you in creating a plan with your Operations Consultant/Advisor to tackle patient collections to increase revenue; and lastly, review common best practice benchmarks.
Before setting your goals, it is important that you remember that every one of them needs to follow the SMART technique. That means that each of your goals need to be: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time Based.
Setting goals may sound easy but monitor the progress to see how you are doing throughout the year it's the hard part. Here are some recommended reports that you can run on a basis to monitor your medical practice and make sure that your progress is in line with your set goals:
Improve your patient collections
Due to all the recent changes in healthcare policies from the Affordable Care Act to COVID, the patient's insurance policies now come with higher deductibles, copays, coins and all around out of pocket expenses, patient payments now contribute to at least 35% of the total income whereas back in 2005 it was only 15%.
It is imperative that you prepare and have the discussions necessary to be as vigil as you can in collecting these payments from patients up front. The longer you wait to collect patient payments the less likely they are to be recovered.
Here are seven key components to improve your patient collections:
Now that you know how to review what you have done in the past and how to set SMART goals for what you would like to do in the future, let us know how we can help you achieve those goals. Feel free to contact us at: marketing@hpiinc.com
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