Importance of Accurate Payment Posting
Consider a scenario, where your amazing employee incorrectly posts the payment of $1002 rather than $102, the claim made its way along medical billing process, the mistake wasn’t caught. First of all, the patient received an excessive bill, which doesn’t inspire confidence in practice. The practices account receivables reports are now inaccurate and the overall financial picture is askew, from one incorrectly entered number.
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. The payment posting process helps you promptly catch potential issues and make corrections. 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.
Accurate Payment Posting and RCM
Payment posting should be an integral part of then revenue cycle management (RCM), regardless of whether you bill in-house or use a third-party billing service. The RCM 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. 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.
Increasing Accuracy of Payment Posting
Here are five ways payment posting can make your billing process more accurate and ultimately increase revenue.
Identify denials
Read explanation of benefits (EOBs) and remittance advice carefully to distinguish paid claims and unpaid claims. Unpaid claims will include denied claims and claims awaiting payment response.
Payment reconciliation
You need to ensure that data from both EOB’s and ERAs should match payments. Sometimes a claim may get paid/denied partially, so you need to ensure to post the payment against the claim accordingly.
Review every line item
As mentioned above, a claim may get paid/denied partially, so review every line item. Reporting denials for medical necessity, non-covered services, and prior authorization to management help avoid errors in the billing cycle.
Identify patient responsibility
Identifying patient responsibility should be done prior visit. But due to absence skilled staff, practices may find patient responsibility from EOBs/ERAs. So, you can post the insurance reimbursements and move balance to patient responsibility.
Write-offs and adjustments
You need to decide rules on write-offs and adjustments and look into contractual adjustments. This will ensure you will clear the pending claims, helping practice to understand accurate account receivables.
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 can 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.
The steps mentioned above will require experts from various RCM functions like charge entry, payment posting, denial handling, Accounts Receivable, benefits verification and other. Practically it may not feasible to have such experts in small billing team of solo practices or small group practices. Medisys Data Solution can assist you in complete revenue cycle management for your practice. As per billing requirement of your practice, we can offer your customized billing services. To know more about our complete medical billing and coding services, contact us at info@medisysdata.com/ 302-261-9187
