When it comes to submitting a medical claim, there’s a couple different ways the process can be achieved. Many practices start off billing manually, since they only have a small number of claims and can handle the workload fairly well. However, as businesses start to grow and take on more clients, billing manually becomes a difficult undertaking. Many businesses turn to billing software to automate their process, speeding up their claims submission journey and finding fewer errors in the process. Still, though, both methods are widely used, so it’s important to look at a comparison. We broke down the two further below.
Manual Insurance Billing
Before technology became widely used in the workplace, everything was done by hand. So it’s no surprise that many people are still comfortable with manual work processes. For small and new businesses, investing in software isn’t financially practical, so handling claims by hand is a realistic decision. For the most part, though, manual billing poses a lot of problems. We took a look at a few steps of the process and what happens when they’re carried out manually.
Patient Insurance Verification
Whether a patient is new or returning, you need to verify insurance coverage before an appointment begins. If you’re handling your operations manually, this may be done via paper documents or an excel spreadsheet—both of which can be difficult to navigate. A manual process means your patients are likely filling out information on paper, so understand that you’ll end up doing more work later on manually sorting through this information than you would if it was digital.
Data Security
The bottom line is, data is more sensitive than ever before. If the depth of your security is a locked file cabinet, well, you’re not going to be able to claim top-notch security. Of course, you can still store patient data digitally without using a software platform, but it’s still unlikely to be as secure.
Billing Errors
No matter how careful you are, errors slip by when you’re billing insurance claims manually. You may be able to double or even triple check your work when you’re only billing a handful of claims each day, but when that number starts to increase, there’s no way you’ll have time to review every single claim before submitting it. This is how billing errors become prevalent, and unfortunately, too many can have serious implications at your business.
Reporting
We can all agree that in-depth reporting is crucial to a business’s growth, future forecast, and financial stability. Since this data is so important to a practice’s overall health, you need it gathered and formatted in a digestible manner as quickly as possible. If you’re asking employees to make spreadsheets, charts, and diagrams to convey these metrics to the entire company, you’re looking at potentially months of work—and that’s just not feasible when you need answers fast.
Electronic Insurance Billing
As the world shifts towards more advanced technology every day, medical billers are doing the same. Medical billing software has revolutionized the billing process and allowed billers to submit claims faster and with fewer errors. These are just some of the ways investing in billing software will change your practice for the better.
Patient Insurance Verification
When a patient arrives for their appointment, it’s crucial to verify their coverage beforehand. If you’re using billing software, it takes only seconds to look up a patient in the database, along with their insurance information. If you need to update the information, or if you need to add a new patient to the database, it’s easy to do so with software.
Data Security
Your patients’ data is precious, and billing software keeps it safe. When you invest in a top-notch platform, you meet HIPAA compliance and other security measures. You don’t have to worry about a data leak, and neither do your patients.
Billing Errors
Billing errors set you back and are bad for business. When you submit claims electronically with medical coding and billing software, you see far fewer errors than you would when manually billing. Billing software scrubs claims for errors before submitting them, so you don’t have to worry about small mistakes turning into big issues. Plus, electronic claims are paid before paper ones, so you’ll find reimbursements in your pocket faster than ever before. Billing errors aren’t always avoidable, but they’re much more avoidable when you’re using a reliable billing platform.
Reporting
Reports are a huge part of your company’s future, so you need a way to develop and analyze them as quickly as possible. Medical billing software features built-in report templates that make it easy to input information and churn out reports in whatever format works best for your company. When you’re using software, there’s no need to set aside months of time to collect data and put it together in a suitable format—software does it in just seconds.
Invest in Your Future
There’s no time like the present to start thinking about the future of your company. If you’re ready to make the switch from manual billing to electronic billing, get in touch with the expert team at Claimgenix today to book your free demo!