According to many polls, by January 31, 2009 the majority of New Year resolutions will have already been abandoned. This does not mean that it should be a day of mourning, but rather it is the time to take stock of what needs to be done to reach the goals that were set at the end of 2008. It is critical to keep in mind two of the corner stones for achieving any goal:
1. Do not view a minor failure (i.e., you just ate a quart of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream) as final defeat (i.e., Well I might as well stop trying to give up sweets); and
2. Break your goal down into manageable pieces (i.e., I will lose 2 pounds in January; 2 lbs in February versus I will lose 25 pounds this year).
So, this is interesting, but how does it apply to medical billing? Well, if you keep these ideas in mind you can use them to achieve lofty improvements in medical billing performance. How? Start with a powerful and straight forward goal: Make sure your claims are clean before you submit them. This will help your medical billing in several ways:
- This goal forces you to concentrate on the most critical elements of medical billing - gathering the proper information and using it to create a clean claim;
- 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.
- It lends itself to technology aids. Invest in a scrubber that will help you find coding problems before you submit the claims. Invest in insurance verification tools that will make it easier to have clean demographics. Invest in coding tools that will help improve your data entry performance.
So, as we approach the end of January this is the time to double down:
- Measure your current performance level;
- 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
- Adopt the mentality that you will learn from your mistakes.
This approach and focus can allow your medical billing efforts to reach new standards of excellence in 2009.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II
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