How a Medical Billing Virtual Assistant Can Streamline Your Revenue Cycle

In today’s world of medicine, having a constant revenue cycle is absolutely essential for healthcare organizations to grow. The problem is, that smaller practices can’t always afford to multitask and balance paperwork with patients. This ends up with a decline in the quality of healthcare they’re able to provide. Alongside that, their revenue cycle ends up suffering as well. 

In order to avoid this, we have medical billing virtual assistants. While keeping up with the documentation, coding, and follow-ups of medical billing is nearly impossible on your own, medical billing assistant make it seem like a breeze. That’s why in today’s article, we’re going to discover all of the benefits you can get by hiring a medical billing associate!

The role of a medical billing virtual assistant

To put it simply, a medical billing professional is just there to handle all of the heavy lifting for you. All of those boring administrative tasks such as organizing documentation, medical coding, and claim submissions, can be handled by your medical assistant. You don’t have to worry about following up with your claims anymore either. 

In a nutshell, a medical billing virtual assistant just makes your life easier. While they handle all of the paperwork, you can spend your time as a medical provider focusing on your patients. This ends up with an increase in your revenue cycle and an improvement in the quality of patient care your healthcare organization is able to deliver.

Enhancing efficiency in patient billing

When it comes to medical billing, efficiency is the best skill one can have. Submitting claims on time and with accuracy can significantly improve your chances of getting compensation faster. A medical billing virtual assistant is responsible for checking for errors in your claims and correcting them. Apart from that, they are also responsible for following up on your claims later on. 

These experts are very up-to-date with the latest regulations and policies regarding medical billing in your state. This helps them create and submit claims with a minimal chance of denial, alongside being able to keep up and comply with industry standards when it comes to medical coding. 

Pro-active claim follow-up and denial management

In the rare case, that your claim gets denied or rejected, your hired professional gets on the case right away. Their main task at that point will be to identify the errors that caused the denial in the first place. Since the claim will have been prepared by them in the first place, the errors will be minimal and resolved pretty quickly.

Once that’s out of the way, the next step is to re-submit your claim. At this point, your claim will have been refined even further. This will increase your chances of approval significantly. Billing experts also spend their time analyzing trends related to claim submissions. This means they’ll also submit your claim at a time when it’s most likely to get accepted and so on.

Efficient payment posting and collection

As with every business out there, healthcare organizations depend on a consistent cash flow to keep growing. There are two aspects of this. The first is payment posting. This is when your hired professional accurately records every relevant transaction that takes place when it comes to medical liens and claims. 

The second aspect is collection. Now, as a medical provider, you can’t afford to spend most of your time trying to track down your patients and recover your money. Thankfully, you can hire someone to do just that. This is where billing experts come into play. They’re responsible for contacting and recovering payments along with payment posting. 

Ensuring data security and compliance

As a medical professional, you have to keep your patients’ medical records safe and secure. By extension, this responsibility falls upon your medical billing virtual assistant as well. These experts are well-versed in the latest protocols and regulations related to securing data. An example of this is being well-versed with compliance standards such as HIPAA.

Without the ability to keep your patients’ data secure, you won’t be able to operate as a healthcare practice at all. This is also why billing experts use the latest software and technology available to ensure that all data is encrypted and cannot be illegally stolen in any regard.

Cost-effective solution for revenue cycle management

Housing a billing department in your healthcare organization can be expensive. It can also take up a lot of your staff’s time and your organization’s resources. In the long run, especially for smaller practices, this isn’t very cost-effective. The easier route to take is outsourcing. Why bother to hire people within your organization, when you can get the same thing done in a cheaper and more hassle-free way?

Another benefit to outsourcing your billing tasks to experts is how they’re able to scale up or down in terms of the growth your organization goes through. Having an in-house staff means hiring more people hence more resources spent. Where-as outsourcing means, you don’t have to worry about an increase in staff as billing companies are able to scale according to each healthcare organization's needs.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, we think it’s pretty apparent that hiring a medical billing virtual assistant is the best step to take, regardless of whether you’re a smaller or larger healthcare organization. It frees up resources, decreases the amount of administrative tasks your medical staff has to deal with, and is an overall more efficient and cost-effective way to operate in today’s medical industry!