You’ve experienced problems in the past with how you billed your patients, leading to missed payments as well as a much longer revenue cycle for those that do pay. Now you are growing more serious about finally using dedicated software that was built with your organization’s needs in mind.
As you and your staff prepare to bring a new medical billing system into your practice, you will likely have some pressing questions that need answering before you can make your selection. Here are the answers to your top five medical billing system questions.
1. Does it Let Me Send Patients Reminders About Payments?
Even under the best of circumstances, you can count on patients failing to get their payments in on time. You’ll want to be work with a medical billing system that lets you generate letters from a template to send to patients, reminding them about the money they owe.
2. Will the System Validate Claims Prior to Submission?
There’s nothing worse in billing than when you put in a claim, only to have it rejected because there was some kind of problem, such as using an incorrect code. Your medical billing system must include a feature that lets it validate claims before they go out. This ensures a better flow of cash in your practice.
3. Can I Use the Software to Generate Reports for Management?
Who doesn’t love spending the bulk of a workday creating reports for stakeholders and other VIPs, let alone the documents that managers require from you on an ongoing basis? The software you choose should let you quickly set up templates to use in making regular reports on various aspects of your medical practice.
4. What Security Is in Place?
Protecting patients’ sensitive information is of paramount importance. If you don’t properly secure their details, the result could be criminal hackers grabbing this information to commit identity theft as well as fraud, wringing every last cent out of your patients’ bank accounts.
Verify that the vendor follows industry best practices for protecting vital patient information.
5. Is there a Cloud Computing Option?
Many medical organizations are discovering the value of using cloud computing services to support their intensive data generation and storage requirements. Instead of running the medical billing software on your own servers in your data center, see if you can opt for a cloud computing solution. All the data will be available to you and your staff as long as they have a secure connection to the Internet.
Now, your IT department won’t need to be concerned about estimating how much server space they will need or how much processing power and bandwidth will be required to let your staff do their job. The cloud computing service provider has its own IT department that will be looking after upgrades and other improvements.
As you compare the medical billing system options now available to you, it will be worth keeping in mind these five questions to guide you toward making a selection. Once you begin using the billing system, you should expect to see better cash flow and improved efficiencies in terms of generating documents ranging from payment reminders to reports for the executive staff.
Key Takeaway
- Before you make a decision about what medical billing system your organization should use, it pays to ask pointed questions to potential software vendors.
- Make sure that the billing system will let you send reminders to patients who are behind in their payments.
- Check that the billing system will take care of claim validation before submission; to cut down on rejects and reduce the time you must wait to get paid.
- Verify that the vendor has included state-of-the-art security and follows best practices when it comes to protecting patient information.
- For greater agility, see if the system you are considering will have a cloud computing option. This will remove a great burden from your IT department.
