Managing the Medical Office in Tough Economic Times

7 Tips on How to Manage the Medical Office in Tough Economic Times

Author:
 Gen Wright

One of the most commonly mentioned advice for coping with tough economic times, is to cut costs. There are many different ways you can cut costs for your businesses. So where do you start? Office management seems to be a good place to start. You can make some changes easily and quickly because you have full control over how you want to run your office.

For example, if you are running a medical practice, now may be a good time to start looking at medical office software to help manage the office more efficiently and more effectively. Consider the functions that a great piece of medical practice software can perform for you:

1 - Check patient eligibility with insurance company to make sure the patient is covered for insurance.

This is a repetitive task that may be taking up too much of your employee\'s time. Have the software do this for you.

2 - Check patient balance when they are calling for an appointment and remind them of any outstanding balance and ask them to bring a check or credit card with them to appointment to pay.

This is an important aspect of the business. The software will help generate healthier revenues from the more efficient payment collection processes.

3 - Collect patient deductible and co insurance at time of service. Offer different payment options.

With the software, you can offer different payment options. Deductible is the amount payable by the patient and cannot be claimed from the insurance company. The software helps to track that to ensure prompt collection.

3 - Followup on all insurance denials or rejections, don\'t let the insurance companies cheat you out of revenue.

Many practices simply give up on insurance claims because they find it too tedious to track the claims. The practice thus ends up losing money. With the software in place, a practice doesn\'t have to lose money due to rejections or denials anymore. Simply follow up with the claims, correct the problems, and rake in the cash.

4 - Schedule efficiently to fill up your schedule efficiently.

Your practice depends on your patient appointments for revenue. So it\'s important to have powerful software that will manage all your appointments for you.

5 - Doctors, be sure to submit info to office staff for hospital and nursing home visits and rounds.

Doctors, being busy and heavily stressed professionals, sometimes forget to submit info for office staff. They can now submit the info through the software.

6 - Immediately bill any claim to patient if insurance company denies.

Sometimes, you may have legitimate denials from insurance companies. Have your software bill patients immediately if an insurance claim fails (e.g. insurance policy expired).

7 - Send patient statements at least monthly - hire a temp if your staff complains about not having time to print, and stuff and stamp the statements. Consider an electronic statement service. For about the cost of stationery, envelopes, and stamp, a service can serve this crucial function.

Monthly billing statements take up a lot of time and the work is not just repetitive but also builds up over time. With a medical practice management software program, you can hire a temp staff to perform such tasks and free up the time of your full time staff. In the long run, you will be saving more money due to better use of your staff\'s time, and declining staff turnover.


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