Most people’s New Year resolutions have been abandoned by the end of January. If you find your self in this group then take heart. You can still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. To do so, you must understand two basic principals of achieving your ambitions:
1. Treat your set backs as temporary failures and not total defeat (i.e., just because you broke down and smoked a cigarette does not mean you should just say I failed on my goal to quit smoking); and
2. Create a series of intermediate goals between where you are and where you want to be (i.e., instead of “I will lose 50 pounds this year” focus on “I will lose 1 pound each week”).
These ideas do not only apply to personal goals, but to business goals as well. If you are trying to improve your medical collections in 2009, you should build upon these concepts. So, given these two points what is the best way to achieve a New Year’s resolution of improving your medical billing? The best place to start is with the goal of getting your claims out the door clean. This is a great starting point because it does many wonderful things:
- It focuses you on the most critical aspect of billing. If the claims go out the door clean you will find that all of the rest of the challenges start to become much more manageable;
- The goal is easily turned into a sequence of smaller more manageable goals such as training the staff on the top 10 date entry errors by the ed of February or achieving a 3% improvement in your acceptance rate by the beginning of April;
- This goal has many ways in which failure provides powerful learning opportunities. You can set aside time to analyze rejected claims to determine the source of the rejection and then focus on eliminating the problem area.
- There are many tools available to help you achieve this goal. They include claims scrubbers, coding tools, training seminars and insurance verification tools.
What does all of this mean? It means this is the time for a renewed focus on your medical billing business goals. It is time to:
- Determine where you stand today (what percentage of your claims get paid on the first submission);
- Write down a powerful and meaningful performance improvement goal (my practice will have over 95% of its claims accepted on the initial transmission);
- Break them down into bite size pieces (I will improve clean claim submissions by 2% each month), and
- Create a plan for how you will learn from rejected claims.
With this approach you can make 2009 your best medical billing year ever.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II
Viewed 43 times by 13 viewers
