Common Mistakes In Urgent Care Center Billing And How To Resolve Them

As the healthcare industry is continuously evolving, there is growth in the number of urgent care centers. Their speed and efficiency in providing healthcare services at an affordable price are what makes them popular. Most urgent care facilities will not let people wait for any duration longer than thirty minutes, and most visits will take lesser than an hour.

There is a risk of losing the revenue, involved in the urgent care market. It just takes a few billing and coding mistakes that may lead to the loss of a significant amount of money. Let’s take a look at the three most common urgent care center billing and coding errors as well as the solutions for these problems.

l Failure to Fix Bad Front Desk Processes

The front desk is the place where the revenue cycle begins. Urgent care center billing completely goes wrong in case of bad financial processes taking place at the front desk. Make sure you gather co-pays when the patient visits begin rather than waiting till the end. Collect prior balances before you start offering new services to any of your patients. Failure to do this ends up in increasing your bad debt and lose your revenue.

To resolve this, you have to focus on establishing financial processes that always start at your front desk. The staff at the desk should be well-trained enough in these processes. Frequently conduct retraining sessions for your staff members to keep everyone updated about the procedures.

l Not Following Credentialing Guidelines

Part of the urgent care center billing is to know the difference between credentialing and contracting. Credentialing is the process used by a payer to confirm the provider’s expertise, qualifications, credibility, and experience so that they can ensure the safety of their patients. All payers have different credentialing requirements, because of which, you should never conclude that all payers have the same requirements. You have to ensure that the providers are credentialed with payers for urgent care centers. This is to see to it that all the claims are properly processed.

Common credentialing problems that crop up mainly include a shortage of time, bad workflow in the organization, and an inability to keep the contact information current. To resolve these common issues, you should recruit credentialing experts who can work with you to navigate each and every credentialing requirement your payers have.

l Wrong Documentation or Under-Coding Charts

It is important to have a solid electronic medical records (EMR) system in place for Urgent Care Centre Billing. But, in spite of having an amazing EMR system in place, it will only be as good as the providers using it. If you don’t document items in the right sections, it can lead to a case of under-coding, which can end up in the loss of revenue. Providers also have to ensure that their documentation should include their exams, history, and MDMs correcting inside of the EMR system. That way, office visit codes will accurately show an account of whatever was done during each visit.

Providers aren’t specialists in coding; all they do is treating patients. This is why it’s important to have your urgent care providers well-informed about the proper usage of your facility’s EMR system. It would also be a wise option to outsource your medical billing services to avoid any losses due to any errors in coding.