First of all, we encourage you to give us a call. That way, you can talk to us and feel confident that your revenue stream is in capable, trustworthy hands. If we don't think we're capable of handling your account, whether it's because of volume or a specialty that's outside of our expertise, we'll tell you straight up. We will not jeopardize your stability, nor our reputation.
Getting started with us is pretty easy. Here's how it works:
First, we will need to get the following items from you:
A signed contract authorizing us to start work. We would be happy doing business with a handshake, but unfortunately Medicare requires them.
Signed copies of EDI agreements authorizing us to bill your electronic claims on your behalf to Medicare, Blue Cross, and maybe some others. We will provide these to you. Matter of fact, we’ll fill them out for you and all you must do is sign them and forward them on to the respective payers. This normally takes about two weeks to set up. We can still enter and hold your claims for these payers in the meantime.
A sample copy of an EOB from each: Medicare, Railroad Medicare, Medicaid, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Workers Comp, and a couple of commercial payers. If you have the original letters where they issued your numbers, that’s great too!
A copy of the billing codes you regularly use and the prices you charge for each one.
A password that you would like to use to access your remote access account.
We will set you up for electronic billing. This takes about two weeks to set up for government payers and Blue Cross. We’ll enter and hold your claims in the meantime. Commercial payers can be billed almost immediately.
We’ll review your codes to ensure that your prices are set as they should be. We sometimes find providers who are charging less than the insurance would pay for that particular code.
We’ll schedule some staff time at your convenience to train your staff on how to access and use our online remote access system. It’s better if we have about three weeks worth of data, including an initial round of insurance payments, in the system before we do the training. Otherwise, we have no real examples of statements, ledgers, payments, and other items to show you. If you’re within 3 hours of us, we’ll probably do this on-site. Otherwise, we’ll do it online through our Remote Control feature, which allows us to take control of your mouse and “show” you how. We also routinely use this little feature to help your staff when they run into a “How do I…” scenario.
Many doctors also schedule some time for us to review their old billing, both for a revenue recovery purpose and also to identify old billing practices that could be undermining the financial health of your practice. We routinely identify undercoding issues; bundling problems; modifiers improperly used or not used at all; and others. For example, we recently performed this function for a practice that was billing a consultation code on the same day as a new patient exam. Of course, insurance companies were bundling them together and paying the lower one. The practice is now billing out only the higher consult code