Follow-up is possibly the most important aspect of medical billing. If billing were a simple A to B – submission to payment – anyone could do it. Thus the need for a good professional biller with some skill and experience to handle your rejected or denied claims. However, when talking to doctors or their staff I continually see that their current biller or billing company is slacking on the follow-up.

What goes wrong?

There are many reasons why a claim may not be paid. Handling claims can be complex and tedious. Insurance companies can be hard to deal with. Anything can happen from data entry errors to insurers quietly getting away with illegally denying ERISA claims. If the biller isn’t keeping track, they may never even know there was a problem.

Sometimes claims contain simple errors that can be tracked down and corrected. If an office manager or practitioner doing their own billing comes across those, they might have time to take care of them. But what happens to all the claims with more complex issues? Do they sit in the A/R forever? Get written off eventually? That’s potentially a whole lot of income lost that a dedicated biller with some experience would know how to tackle.

What can be done about it?

Knowing when and how to follow-up on an unpaid claim is vital to collecting the money that you have worked hard for.

We are tenacious about follow-up, and that has a lot to do with our success. We get answers, get problems corrected and addressed, and get it done timely. We know how to talk to insurance companies to unravel the mysteries – we do it every day.

When we take on a new client, it never fails that there is a period of cleaning up billing messes that have been left behind. There is the process of the hunt, and solving the puzzle of what went wrong. This is something that we excel in, and actually enjoy! Each claim can be traced back to the underlying reason it was denied or remained unpaid. Making the corrections, and communicating about them with the office staff results in the prevention of a great number of potential future denials. We work to get your claims submitted correctly the first time, thus reducing the long waits between patient treatment and payment.

By reducing your denial rate, we bring more money to the bottom line of your practice. The payoff of our tenacity is the difference between a practice that’s just getting by and one that’s truly profitable.

Kat Jordan is the Owner and President of Orion Billing Services. With over twelve years of experience in healthcare billing, Orion is well prepared to help with thorough, knowledgeable claims submission, follow-up and collection. Call (727) 492-4801 for more information. Subscribe to our mailing list here.