A well-rounded revenue cycle management (RCM) system is key to a thriving optometry practice. By optimizing billing and coding tasks, such a system keeps your practice’s financial health intact. Establishing an excellent RCM workflow can thus help you maintain a stable revenue stream for your optometry practice.
Although providing patient care is their core responsibility, eye care professionals should find ways to streamline their RCM tasks. This makes sure that their practice is generating good revenue and they can focus entirely on treating patients without worrying about the business side of things.
Following are 6 useful strategies that you can incorporate to enhance your optometry practice’s cash flow significantly.
Ensuring Accuracy in Credentialing and Enrollment Procedures
Optometry provider credentialing and enrollment are extremely tedious and time-consuming processes. Relying on traditional systems or manual methods also results in increasing the duration of this process. Hence, healthcare providers must make use of high-end automated systems. Not only will this speed up the operations but also make sure that the data entered is 100% accurate. Consequently, this will protect your revenue or reimbursements from getting affected.
Authenticating Insurance Eligibility and Benefits
While submitting any claim to a clearinghouse or to the payers, it is important to first check the insurance eligibility and coverage details of the patient. You must always ensure that the patient information and insurance data are absolutely correct before making any submissions. This can prevent any possibilities of claim denials or rejections. It also helps in identifying the amount a patient may owe (co-pays, deductibles, etc) to your practice.
Making Error-free Optometry Billing Charge Entries
Optometry billing charge entry is a process where diagnosis, procedure, or modifier codes are assigned to the claims before submitting them. Correctness in the charge entry process is crucial as it decides whether your claim will get denied, or rejected or if you will receive the desired reimbursement amount. Even a small mistake can lead to massive monetary losses. Hence, the optometry billing staff needs to be extra careful while assigning codes and modifiers to the claims.
Staying Up-to-date with Constant Regulatory Revisions
Optometry billing and coding guidelines are constantly evolving. It is important for optometry providers to always stay on top of these ever-changing rules. If you submit claims that are not in line with the latest rules and regulations, they might get denied and impact your reimbursements. For this reason, optometry providers should either have an expert in-house billing and coding staff or outsource their RCM functions to industry specialists.
Boosting Collections with Daily Claim Submissions
Achieving a stable and positive cash flow is something that every optometry provider wishes for. However, this goal can only be reached by setting up a well-defined claim submission process. Submitting claims on a daily basis is the best way to minimize outstanding optometry accounts receivables as it reduces the A/R (accounts receivables) days. Daily submission ensures that claims are getting processed by insurance companies at the earliest, thereby helping optometry providers to receive their reimbursements faster.
Mastering the Management of Claim Denials and Rejections
For every optometry provider, it is necessary to research and find out the reason behind every claim denial or rejection. This is because the denied claim needs to be corrected and submitted again at the earliest. It also helps the optometry provider to identify the most common mistakes that lead to the rejection of claims. As a result, optometry practices are enabled to take precautionary measures to not make the same errors again, thereby reducing claim denials and rejections significantly.
Are you looking to improve the financial performance of your optometry practice? The seasoned billing and coding specialists at CS Eye can streamline your RCM processes and help you get paid faster. Get in touch with us to know how our exceptional revenue cycle management tool can enhance your RCM functions and drive high and consistent returns for your practice.
