Is your Practice Prepared to deal with Radiology Billing Challenges?

Outsourcing of radiology billing services has become a common trend in the US healthcare industry. Healthcare experts are choosing to hire a reliable medical billing partner to ensure accuracy in claims submission. This is because lack of time and manpower has made it daunting for radiologists to keep a track of billing and coding processes. Billing inefficiencies are not only resulting in denials and affecting payments but also impacting the integrity of the practice.

Radiology practices are constantly under pressure to prove their value and stay ahead of the curve. Considering the changes in payment models and introduction of quality measures, they have to make more efforts in order to thrive and survive in the changing landscape. If claim denials and delayed payments have been an issue for your radiology practice as well, then you need to take necessary measures in order to get your practice back on track.

Here are some of the common radiology billing challenges that maybe eating into the bottom line of your practice:

• Increased billing error monitoring
• More focus on recovery audits, targeting reimbursement errors
• Documentation errors
• Lack of right practice management resources

Evaluating your practice

In order to assess whether or not your practice is ready to deal with billing challenges, you first need to evaluate your billing-to-cash cycle. You need to see if the incoming cash flow for at least the last one year has been consistent or not. Evaluate if the existing IT infrastructure at your practice is fit enough to handle all billing requirements, is there a need for any significant upgrade, are you satisfied with the way your team is handling the compliance and auditing requirements. You will need answers to these questions in order to prepare your practice for future regulatory and payments changes.

Even if your in-house billing operations are hassle-free and stable, evaluation of your billing operations is very necessary. This will help you identify loopholes, if any.

Is outsourcing the solution?

Since radiology practices need to ensure efficient and accurate billing and also reduce overhead costs, they are choosing to outsource these services to a third party. By teaming with a reliable billing partner, they are saving time as well as money. They are not only getting timely reimbursements but outsourcing has also eliminated the hassles of compliance to HIPAA and other reforms for them.