Old AR Recovery in Medical Billing

Posted by Ecareindia on March 27th, 2015

Earning the goodwill of clients and acquiring a solid foundation in the highly-competitive US healthcare domain is an ongoing struggle for medical billing companies. To keep clients happy and also shore up the bottom-line, US medical claims processing companies do accept projects with a lot of old AR. However, not many of these companies succeed in fully cleaning up old account receivables and manage denials prudently. The reason is that they do not have a dedicated team of professionals who are highly skilled and work exclusively on account receivables and denial management. The following points will shed light on how the US healthcare entities can recover old AR and manage them astutely:

Medical Billing AR Follow-up: Submitting claims after the TFL (Timely Filing Limit) is considered as the main cause for AR pile-up. The TFL varies from one insurance Payer to the other. The TFL may be as short as 30 days or as long as 2 years. It is the duty of the US medical claims processing companies to learn the predetermined TFL of their clients’ Payers and submit claims accordingly.

Filing an Appeal: Another important thing to note is filling an appeal for the denied claims. A claim may be denied for several reasons, which must be carefully reviewed by account receivable management professionals. It is highly advisable that an appeal must be filed within 7 days from receiving a denial notice from the Payer. If the re-filing of denied claims does not happen within the appeal time limits of the Payer, then reimbursements would become too tough.

EDI, ATB & Aging AR Reports: Reports can be of great help to proper account receivable and denial management. One can track the status of claims using EDI reports without much effort. The ATB (Aged Trial Balance) report is used for easy medical billing AR follow-up as it sheds light on the outstanding amount due. The aging AR report allows medical claims processing specialists to keep the AR age within DRO (Days in Receivables Outstanding) limit of 60 and 90. Such good reporting practices are often missed in US medical claims processing companies. To get these services, they can approach highly-experienced offshore medical billing companies.

Recruiting Skilled Professionals or Training In-house Staff: Thinking that outsourcing to offshore medical billing companies might be costly, many US healthcare entities decide to recruit skilled professionals or train the existing staff on the techniques for handling old account receivables and denial management. This perception on costs is not justified, as outsourcing to offshore medical billing companies only saves money.

Therefore, it is advisable to get help from a renowned and experienced offshore medical billing company like e-care instead of handling old AR in-house.

About E-care India:

E-care India has 15 years of experience in the industry. E-care’s 3 offshore medical billing delivery centers have been providing end-to-end account receivable and denial management services seamlessly to its clients. To know more about e-care and its services, log on to www.ecareindia.com.