Top 5 Challenges with Urgent Care Billing

Patient payment trends, pandemic, and changing patient behavior with the practice are some of the things affecting urgent care in the last few years. Mainly because we are battling with COVID-19 right now, the end of 2019 gave us chills and patient care has changed its face. Along with daily processes, urgent care medical billing has also changed and at 24/7 Medical Billing Services, we tried to figure out some challenges associated with urgent care billing.

Recently, we have had conversations with our clients and tried to understand what they feel about these challenges. We expected something different but everyone expressed the same challenges mentioned before like payment trends, pandemic, and patients behaving differently.

Facts we found

As a result, many urgent care billing companies and service providers expanded rapidly. The capacity of providing health care services quickly, efficiently, and got affordable with extreme popularity. A number of urgent care center’s are providing ultimate quality services with lesser than 30 minutes of waiting periods, and appointments within an hour. Unlike any other practice, the urgent care billing process is a bit different. Quick admissions, faster insurance applications, and eventually equally faster reimbursement create so many challenges with urgent care billing.

Would you like to know how 24/7 Medical Billing Services handles challenges related to Urology Billing Services?

Please continue reading the top challenges below and get ready to relate your practice with them. If you are experiencing the same challenges, we can help you out.

• Urgent care facility has inefficient front-of-house processes

The medical billing cycle of urgent care facility starts at your front desk. One of the most common faults in urgent care billing is the dependable systems are not present. Co-pays should be collected when the patient admission starts rather than at the end.

Previous balances are recommended to be collected before new services are provided to patients. If urgent care billing processes are not followed accurately, you might lose revenue, increased bad debt, and increased patient accounts that go into collections.

Solution:

You can start with resolving this issue by establishing financial systems that are provided at the front desk. Equip your front-desk employees with all of the related procedures. Plan retraining workshops frequently to ensure your workforce is always updated on your practices.

• Unfavorable Contracts

While signing contracts with payers, a legal agreement with the payer should be in place. With this agreement, the payer is supposed to reimburse your facility based on the pricing schedule you agreed to and then provides your practice as an in-network center in their network directory. It’s not advised to accept insurance if you don’t have contracts with your payers, hence, having a patient volume in numbers becomes much more difficult.

With lackluster contracts, the urgent care billing process becomes unreliable. If your contract has a low reimbursement rate, you’re barely making a living for the services you deliver to patients. You must have accurate reimbursement rates decided that represent the entire range of services provided by your urgent care clinic.

Solution:

It may get difficult to negotiate higher reimbursement rates. But you can negotiate higher rates with payers. You might prefer engaging a professional medical billing agency to handle your discussions and ensure that you get the best reimbursement rates possible.

• Improper documentation or under-coding

Even with extraordinary electronic medical records systems at your practice, your EMR will be as efficient as the doctors that use it. Failing to document items in the proper places may result in unintended under-coding, which may result in lower revenue for the facility.

Medical billing providers must also identify and that all history, analysis, and MDMs are properly documented in the EMR system so that the office visit codes correctly reflect what occurred during the visit.

Solution:

Make sure that some of the practitioners are fully informed on how to handle the EMR system. It is a crucial part of an accurate urgent care billing company. Refresher courses come in handy from time to time to remind you how to use the EMR system.

24/7 Medical Billing Services is the most proficient urgent care billing system in the market

24/7 Medical Billing Services can help you with your claims settled and lowering your losses in this case. Our proactive and simple urgent care billing management strategy ensures a continuous flow of cash into your practice along with providing you comprehensive insights and assurity of your payments while handling urgent care billing process at every stage.

24/7 Medical Billing Services excels where others falter:

We do offer complete urgent care billing and coding support at 2.9% of collections from all services.

• We are the only RCM service provider that provides hands-on assistance
• Charges can be discussed with long contracts and the best quality service provided
• Industry leading clientele and reviews from top practices in the business
• Our team ensures that there will be no backlog as we operate every day of the week

We have a team with CPC-certified coders providing you hands-on support that understands what it takes to get your cash flow. We ensure that no one can match what we offer, capability, and incredible consistency. Along with this, we help you with a secure service environment.

Conclusion

Addressing these urgent signals in urgent care billing challenges can result in a huge revenue increase for your clinic. If you are not sure if your urgent care center is making these errors, facing challenges, and need assistance in addressing them, contacting a full-proof urgent care billing company that has the capability of handling urgent care revenue cycle management, such as 24/7 Medical Billing Services, might be advantageous.