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EHR and Medical Billing

Calendars full of appointments and robust patient panels do not necessarily guarantee an increase in the revenue. Your practice can see a certain number of patients/clients each day, and you can only increase this to a number your providers can handle. The good news is that the additional revenue you are looking for already exists. It might have been affected owing to inefficient electronic health records or even under the slow-paced manual billing processes.

EHR and medical billing systems

It is possible to dig out additional revenue from inside your practice; this does not even have to be a time-intensive or expensive exercise. That is where the modern billing and EHR systems come along; both work to automate and even streamline internal systems, resulting in a renewed and robust revenue stream. In addition, the EHR and Medical Billing systems work to increase practice efficiencies.

EHRs streamlines complexity

The biggest challenge in practice revenue is to streamline or simplify reimbursement procedures’ complexity without touching the cycle’s basics. First, a patient needs to be delivered, documented, and their payments collected efficiently. Afterwards, patient care data must be retrievable for EHR and coded precisely to capture all charges while creating accurate and successful claims.  

After that is done, on-time billing must be executed, and denials with underpayments must be tracked. If these steps are left to the manual systems, the earned/projected revenue can get locked away inside the practice, never being able to be retrievable for accurate cash flow.

EHRs and medical practice revenue

Conversely, workable sophisticated EHR systems are designed to produce/safeguard revenue potential. These systems are impressively evolved, incorporating the power of a knowledge base to enhance performance, reliability, and usability. EHRs fuse many different practice operations and functions to offer practitioners straightforward and non-complex access for critical tasks in one application; these include:

  • Appointments
  • Patient notes
  • Document manager
  • Clinical reviews
  • Patient histories or data

Such EHR and Medical Billing systems stay true to the real spirit of doctors’ frustrations that most physicians go through with their practices and revenue generation. Moreover, EHR systems effectively answer with institutive solutions which are inexpensive to set up and easy to use.

Some other reasons make finding a suitable EHR necessary. For instance, an EHR system for use in multi-physician and multi-office practices must have required integrations specific to unique requirements. These requirements include scheduling, data mining of reports, intuitive billing, and more.

Also, it must offer the financial momentum that most practices require for sustainability; these include:

  • Decreased cost and risk
  • Improved productivity
  • Ensured compliance
  • Accelerated revenue cycle
  • Enhanced service quality

And just like that, the revenue streams turn into flowing rivers of steady cash flow. To that effect, if you are looking for professional medical billing services, Physicians Revenue Group, Inc. has you covered.

Growing practice effectiveness and cost savings

There is a pressing need to swap inefficient EHRs with practical and modern problem-solving systems. The Integrated and advanced EHRs boost practice efficiency while saving costs via minimizing expenses and manual labor.

The benefits of effective EHR and medical billing include but are not limited to the following:

  • Low transcription costs
  • Less manual labor resources and time; eliminating hours for pulling, storing, and re-filing charts
  • Better-quality documentation and automated coding capabilities
  • Drop in lost charges

The streamlining and interoperability of practice operations offer practitioners peace of mind. All of the tasks required to come together for improving coordination, delivery of care, and pharmacy checks, in addition to revenue generation, can take place without a practitioner dedicating time to each. Electronic Health Records (EHR) improve a practice’s efficiency of operations, unlocking increased revenue streams.

Medical practices with the ideal EHR systems report the below-mentioned efficiencies:

  • Enhanced practice management via integrating scheduling systems that link appointments with the progress notes, manage claims and automate coding.
  • Saves time with centralized chart management, condition-specific queries, and other such shortcuts
  • Improved communication with other clinicians, health plans, and labs via:
  1. Access to patient information from anywhere in the world
  2. Electronic messages tracking to other clinicians, staff, labs, hospitals, etc.
  3. Automatic formulary checks via health plans
  4. Requesting and receipts of lab tests, and diagnostic images
  5. By being linked to the public health systems, including communicable disease databases and registries

Increasing productivity and revenue

Practitioners and doctors spend almost 20% of their time on administrative tasks. Doing so dramatically takes away from the face-to-face patient care time and might also lead to physician burnout. While on the other hand, when automation of practice functions increases staff and physicians’ productivity, the revenue increase comes hand in hand with it. Medical practices can expect to experience the following:

  • Better quality for CMS quality metrics, with improved reimbursement rates
  • Meeting regulatory requirements, and avoiding fines, or lost payments via auto EHR alerts
  • Decrease in staff time spent on manual entries, which results in precise, correct, and timely billing
  • Auto-generated alerts that help decrease claim denials, lost charges from CMS, the likes of Advance Beneficiary Notice

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Better EHRS – the need of the hour

According to a survey by Black book research, over 19,000 EHR users show interest in swapping out their current EHR system in the next 3 years in favor of a more customizable and integrated one. In addition, users now prefer cloud-based, mobile tools that can present runtime and on-demand data with visibility of financial performance, quality goals, and compliance tracking.

These requirements are reasonable but rather basic as the only way to move forward. Medical practices of all scales and sizes should be able to maximize the use of email messages, and interoperability between the stakeholders, including:

  • Payers
  • Patients
  • Pharmacies
  • Radiology/imaging services
  • Health information exchanges
  • DICOM-compliant imaging equipment
  • Hospital networks
  • Specialty registries
  • Referring providers
  • Syndromic surveillance agencies
  • Immunization registries
  • Electronic devices
  • Cancer registries

Interoperability of this scale might still be out of reach for small-sized practices. Still, it shouldn’t be, especially not when EHRs exist to create large networks economically and quickly.

Tips to increase practice revenue

The initiative to avoid surprise billing is worth paying heed to; reports suggest that surprise bills affect over 57% of adults. The state legislatures are moving to stop surprise billing. So far, 9 states have implemented surprise billing protection laws, while 15 more have partial surprise billing laws in action. PEW Trusts states:

  • Over 25 states have some laws to protect patients from surprise billing, mainly for the emergency care patients receive at hospitals or ambulatory surgical centers
  • 20 more states are planning their legislation in the near future

Without a doubt, practices have a right to reimbursement for patient care, but balance billing stays in the crosshairs of people pushing for surprise bill legislation. So it befits medical practices to get their medical billing right while practicing transparency with patients. The first step is to it has an automated EHR system that generates a patient’s payment responsibility so patients are informed and educated at the time of service.

Harnessing the power of EHRs

Medical Billing and revenue are a complicated and messy world. The smart way to maximize practice revenue is by automating and streamlining practice revenue operations. With that done, your practice is likely to deduce that structured visibility and access to patient data helps in improving diagnosis, education, prescription, and end-patient outcomes. Boosted revenue and enhanced patient care are what we all want.

Physicians Revenue Group, Inc. offers superior medical billing services, remote patient care, provider credentialing, chronic care management, revenue cycle management, and medical auditing services.

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