Urgent Care Medical Billing Services are Making the Difference
Urgent care medical billing services have taken up from where the internal staff of the healthcare practices around the country ceased to act. The shift in the trend is due to the in-house staffs’ inability to deal with the typicality of urgent care billing, which is quite different from billing for hospital emergency rooms.
Although there are some apparent similarities, urgent care centers differ in the type of treatment services rendered. Primarily, the urgent care centers treat patients in serious but in non-life-threatening conditions. The hospital emergencies, on the other hand, treat patients with a life or limb-threatening condition that might involve severe wounds/amputations. Healthcare facilities that provide primary care services besides urgent care, they need a separate taxpayer identification number to bill urgent care services. Apart from these, there are several other medical billing issues that are forcing the urgent care centers to opt for professional medical billing agencies.
Urgent Care medical Billing Woes
One of the root problems of urgent care centers is the short-staffing issue. The low-margin revenue return is the main reason behind the inability of the practices to recruit new employees or FTEs according to their needs. Working tirelessly to provide the best of patient care, these limited numbers of employees commit unforced errors as an effect of the overwork they do. This affects the billing in a very negative way.
Urgent care billing is focused on a few typical problems. To cope up with those, there’s a need for more number of staff who are efficient and skilled to handle such issues. The typical issues centring on the urgent care include cases with copays and coinsurances that demand special attention from the billing executives. The reason behind this is the insurance companies’ reluctance to reimburse certain preventive and routine cares such as some vaccinations, medicines, etc.
As the urgent care centers lose revenue arising from the errors that stimulate rejections, they should zero-in on areas to shortlist and select the ideal billing service for them. Some areas they need to look at are:
- 100% HIPAA and other industry compliance
- Lowest fees
- standalone services
- Accurate checks and balances
- Maximum accuracy
- Dedicated managers without extra charge
- Instant reductions in operational costs
- Excellent references
- No hidden costs in the contract