Rethink Charge Tickets to Boost Your Revenue
Is your practice letting procedures go unbilled? You may not think so, but the numbers across the healthcare industry speak for themselves: an estimated 3-5 percent of annual practice revenue is lost simply due to failing to bill for services rendered.
Resolving the problem requires addressing the link between the patient encounter and your back office or medical billing company. How are you communicating information from your providers to your coders regarding services rendered?
Some practices leave it up to the coders to comb through a physician’s documentation, but that can lead to issues. Your coders are busy; if they have a wealth of records to search through they can easily miss things. And if they have questions about how to code a patient encounter or what exactly happened in the exam room, the provider may be difficult to reach to address them.
Using an electronic health record may minimize the problem – depending on its features and capabilities – but it’s likely not the cure-all. The solution to missing charges may be an old-fashioned, paper-based one: charge tickets.
Reduce the Room for Error
They go by a lot of names – superbills, route slips, and route sheets among them – but charge tickets have long been a mainstay of the revenue cycle process. If your practice has shifted away from using them in today’s increasingly tech-driven healthcare environment, it may be time to rethink your strategy.
Charge tickets are the easiest way to hold your providers accountable for communicating actual information on services rendered. A charge ticket is a list of procedures commonly performed in your office. If you have your practitioners keep them with them during patient encounters, they can easily mark down diagnoses and services performed – making things a lot simpler for your billers and coders.
For your charge tickets to be effective, however, there are some key considerations to keep in mind:
- Make it easy for physicians to keep charge tickets with them in all contexts and environments in which they encounter patients. A booklet they can keep in their pockets is a wise choice.
- Number each doctor’s charge tickets sequentially. That way, your coders can spot if one gets mysteriously skipped (like a checkbook).
- Train providers to properly complete the charge ticket after completing their documentation for each and every encounter, and to deliver them to your back office team at the end of each day. Make the charge ticket procedures mandatory under your office policies so they don’t fall by the wayside.
- Update your charge ticket at least once a year to make sure it reflects accurate coding methodologies and includes all common diagnoses and frequently performed procedures for your practice.
Sometimes, the “old-fashioned way” of doing things around the office is the best way to boost your revenue. Incorporating – or reincorporating – smart charge ticket processes into your day-to-day routine can help you ensure fewer billable procedures slip through the cracks.
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