5 Common Mistakes Physicians Commit with their Family Practice Billing

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5 Common Mistakes Physicians Commit with their
Family Practice Billing

• The family practice medical service is
  all-encompassing and involves more than one field
  of medicine. Ideally, medical billers who work
  for family practice need to have extensive
  knowledge of diagnosis and procedure codes
  commonly used by the physician. This ensures that
  patients and insurance companies are billed
  correctly. It also guarantees that the physician
  receives maximum reimbursement for the service
  provided.
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• Basic mistakes in family practice billing
• Neglect to verify their patients Insurance
• Very often medical billing claims get refused on
  the basic ground that the patients coverage has
  been terminated or may not be eligible for the
  date of service. Family physicians often take for
  granted that their regular patient, whose
  insurance had been verified initially, stands the
  same every time they come in. This may not always
  be the case.
• 2. Simple inaccuracies during form filling

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5 Common Mistakes Physicians Commit with their
Family Practice Billing
Often family physicians are so occupied with
putting their regular patients at ease that they
tend to forget about filling the simplest and
smallest of details right from the spelling of
the patients name to whether the diagnosis code
corresponds to the procedure being performed.
This causes claim denials or at the very least
delays in reimbursements. 3. Wrongly coded A
majority of the time due to the hand-filled
forms, misinterpretation of the family physician
handwritten coding can lead to claim denials.
Further, family physicians often fail to update
their coding books, which can cause further
delays in claim denials and their resubmissions.
Also, due to upcoding, wherein a level of service
or procedure has not been performed, but in order
to collect a higher reimbursement, the procedure
has been billed, can cause problems of fraud. 4.
Negligent audits Chart audits are known to help
track all parts of a claim and that they are
billed correctly.
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5 Common Mistakes Physicians Commit with their
Family Practice Billing
Due to the friendly atmosphere at the family
physicians clinic, often even if a procedure or
test has been canceled, the filled forms go
ahead, even though it could be a human error.
This often gets physicians into cases of fraud,
something that may not have intended to do. But
often, due to unbundling, where services are
billed separately instead of being billed under a
single charge, and careless chart audits are
conducted, can cost the practice dearly. 5.
Under billing Medical billers working in
physicians offices often are not aware of the
billing rules for services that Non-physician
Practitioners (NPPs) perform. Also, awareness and
understanding of the incident-to billing rules
and shared visit regulations by physicians are
very essential if and when hiring NPPs, as if not
billed to Medicare then physicians can lose
nearly 85 of the scheduled fee a major loss of
revenue that they cannot afford. To help avoid
such simple but expensive mistakes, it is wise
that the billers and coders are thoroughly
trained or look for a medical billing
company that is updated with the latest of codes
and regulations to help faster reimbursements and
avoid fraudulent cases. Get in touch with us!