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. View your failures (i.e., I have not flossed in two days) as minor set backs and not as utter failure (i.e., I might as well start saving for dentures); 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”).
Although these concepts may seem simple, they are quite powerful - not only in your personal life but in your business as well. These two ideas can be leveraged to dramatically improve your medial billing this year. A great way to start this journey is with the goal of having 95% of your claims accepted on the first submission. This goal will have an extraordinary impact on your medial billing performance:
- You can only achieve it by having a laser focus on the front end elements of medical billing. This is where the medical billing “game” is won or lost;
- It allows you to focus on achievable, smaller goals (85% of claims go out clean in January, 87% go out clean in February, etc);
- Individual failures (rejected claims), provide fertile learning opportunities for improving your medical billing process. As long as you look at rejected claims with an eye towards how you can stop the rejections in the future and not just with a mind set of how do I fix this individual claim.
- 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.
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:
- Measure your current performance level;
- Decide upon a stretch target (I will increase my clean claim percentage by 15 points this year);
- Turn your goal into a sequence of achievable goals (my clean claims rate will be 88% by the end of March, etc); and
- Develop a process for gleaning learning from claims that do not initially clear the clean claim hurdle.
Implement these steps and you can achieve significantly better medical billing results in 2009 than you realized in previous years.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II
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