An Overview on Common Challenges with SNF Billing Services
Skilled Nursing Facilities or SNFs are growing in every corner of this world; especially in the United States. Currently, these facilities are funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and private pay. Are you a skilled nursing facility trying to reform your internal methods? How a medical billing company can help you achieve your target, complete your goals and expand your business?
Outsourcing skilled nursing billing services increases provider's cash collection by 17% and reduced billing errors by 80%.
Wondering how?
Here’s a brief case study on how some common challenges faced by a skilled nursing facility were overcome with the help of 24/7 Medical Billing Services.
Client Profile
Our client is a multi-facility skilled nursing organization dedicated to serving patients in the Midwest, Illinois. The organization was facing problems collecting and maintaining a steady cash flow after recently acquiring more than 30 facilities.
Challenge
We all know 'Cash is King'. Maintaining a steady and constant cash flow is one of the burning issues that affect many healthcare providers, especially when economies are rapidly transforming the healthcare landscape. The skilled nursing world is not an exception. Organizations trying to go through transitionary phases like process realignment and systems implementation are particularly susceptible to declining cash flow, both during and during these transitions.
Our client, a skilled nursing provider had recently grown to more than 30 facilities around multiple states and was met with frustration when trying to scale operations to meet the needs of increased volume. The client experienced challenges collecting and maintaining a continuous cash flow. Some of the particular challenges related to the client's operations included a lack of payor information, multiple payor setup issues, and unclear knowledge of billing guidelines. Moreover, the client identified an opportunity for improvement in communications between billing locations after acquisition.
Solution
The client-side team includes highly experienced skilled nursing revenue cycle specialists fine-tuned the revenue cycle process and took the strategic plan of working through the current payor setups, defining requirements, and creating more granular segmentation within similar, but different payor plans.
The client has connections with commercial payors where it verifies requirements for claims and billing. Our team offered scalablebillingoutsourcing resources to resolve large volumes of accounts receivables and instantly turned cash collections around.
Our client also bonded the level of communications with rejected claims to process and rebill them at a specific time. By explaining claim errors to their staff, improvements were made to the client's system and process functions. Our client needed weekly reports from us to facilitate thorough communication between facilities. We held a more accurate check of the previous month's claims' diagnoses, payor setups, admission dates, therapies, and authorizations before releasing the bill.
When we crossed 3 months of our agreement the client had increased collections from a monthly average of $15M to $19M, more than a 17% increase in cash flow. In addition, payor setups in the billing system were improved to increase the efficiency of monthly billing and the checking process increased the communication about claim status during the pre-bill phase. Both of these billing process improvements led to a more than 80% reduction in billing errors.
Get to know 24/7 Medical Billing Services
With our client base spreading the continuum of care, our insights into both acute and post acute operations will position your facility to thrive under new models. Serving more than 40 specialties, 24/7 Medical Billing Services is proficient in handling services for multiple healthcare providers and facilities. The main goal of 24/7 Medical Billing Services is to help physicians and clinics looking for expert billing and coders.