On a drizzly, overcast Thursday afternoon, Jane, working on claims for the day, mistakenly entered $5005 instead of $ 505, didn’t catch it and moved on. As the claim made its way along the practice’s medical billing process, the mistake wasn’t caught quickly and lead to several issues.
First of all, the patient received an extravagant bill, which doesn’t inspire confidence in practice. In addition, the practices account receivables reports are now inaccurate and the overall financial picture is skewed, from one incorrectly entered number by an otherwise amazing employee.
Payment posting provides insight into a practice’s daily revenue stream and shouldn’t be ignored. The payment posting process helps you promptly catch potential issues and make corrections. If Jane’s practice were using payment posting to its fullest extent, this seemingly simple mistake would not have caused so many problems before being addressed.
What is Payment Posting?
Payment posting allows you to view payments and provides a snapshot of a practice’s financial picture, making it easy to identify issues and solve problems fast.
Being able to see daily Insurance payments from EOBs, insurance checks from ERAs, patient payments and more having an efficient payment posting system provides an efficient view of your day-to-day financial picture.
Why is Accurate Payment Posting Important?
The medical billing process has several steps and a large number of claims are processed daily, meaning issues are bound to arise. Payment posting is essentially the first line of defense to identifying payer problems. Issues such as denials for medical necessity, non-covered services and prior authorization will be uncovered and can be given to team members to address.
In addition, catching issues quickly make the entire process smoother for everyone involved from the front office to back-office staff.
How Payment Posting Fits In the Revenue Cycle
Payment posting should be an integral part of the revenue cycle, regardless of whether you bill in-house or use a third-party billing service.
A well-done payment posting process can help you identify opportunities to increase revenue by watching for daily trends within your practice. Because payment posting has such a high potential to increase profits and smooth out the overall medical billing process, it is important to get a precise process in place.
Here are six ways payment posting can make your billing process more efficient and ultimately increase revenue.
EOB and ERA Posting and Reconcilement – ensuring data from both EOB’s and ERAs match payments.
Line item denials – reporting denials for medical necessity, non-covered services, and prior authorization to management help avoid errors in the billing cycle.
Denials – finding denials and ensuring they are reworked and resubmitted to responsible payers in an efficient manner.
Patient responsibility – identifying and moving balances to patient responsibility helps ensure faster patient billing.
Write-offs and adjustments – processing write-offs, adjustments and looking into contractual adjustments, and passing them to management when issues are identified.
In-person collection issues – identifying issues with collecting deductibles and/or copayments when processing insurance remittances have a major impact on the overall billing process. By utilizing payment posting, these mishaps can be avoided.
When payment posting is done right, your practice can thrive. With better cash flow from better collections, problems being spotted faster and dealt with quicker, the entire medical billing process is sure to run smoother. Billing issues can be addressed quickly, secondary payers will be billed correctly and patients will receive their statements promptly increasing the entire medical billing cycle’s efficiency. Anything you can do to make the medical billing process smoother makes everyone happy!
