front office tools Archives

Credentialing: is it time to upgrade your process with software?

Credentialing can be a frustrating, mysterious, time-consuming process. It can seem like a black box: you throw your (copious) data in (with no idea what will happen to it), then hope you'll get what you want out of the other side (eventually -- you have no control over when). Worse, unlike most other administrative tasks your staff handles, credentialing has seemed immune to process improvement. It's no wonder so many practices outsource this tedious, unpredictable paper-pushing. But that can lead to another set of problems. For example, when delays occur, how do you know whether there's a problem with the application, the payer is just slow, or your credentialing service dropped the ball at some point? Constantly checking in with a credentialing service for updates wastes valuable time on both sides -- especially since your credentialing service has no more control over how long it takes payers to respond than you do. Thankfully, dear reader, you and I are not the only people who've observed the built-in productivity drains in credentialing the old-fashioned way. In recent years, technology whizzes have stepped in to improve the process. There are still frustrating pieces of the puzzle that technology can't yet fix -- like the need for physicians to gather all that information in the first place, and like the uncertainty about where submitted applications stand with payers. But technology can help with: maintaining a single source of credentials -- to avoid submitting out-of-date information or incomplete information tracking key dates enabling physicians to enter their own information via a portal -- to avoid double entry of data, and the associated costs and errors automating the completion of many forms in some cases, automatically updating or communicating electronically with important third parties like CAQH If you are not yet using a credentialing software product, now is the time to check your options out. And if you're outsourcing, it may be more efficient to bring the task back in house, supported by up-to-date software. Or if you continue to use a credentialing service, be sure that your partner uses a cloud-based system that you

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:45-08:00December 4th, 2018|

Responding to external trends that threaten practice profitability

When we work with physicians and managers who've found their financial results have inexplicably declined, they often wonder why the profit numbers changed when the practice is still managed in the same careful way as before. It's a puzzle and a disappointment and a huge source of frustration! But therein lies the rub: As managers, our job is often to respond to changes that happen outside our business. Doing things the same way, even when executing perfectly, is often not enough to assure good results. Things are happening in the broader market that affect our patients and their behavior. It's our job to recognize when trends that have nothing to do with medicine still require a response from our industry. One really powerful example of a completely external trend that is nonetheless affecting every practice business is the rapid adoption of online payments by consumers. If your practice hasn't responded to this trend, it's probably already affecting your collections negatively. The shift in payment behavior by consumers has been dramatic. I created the chart to the left using USPS data showing that single-piece stamped mail has declined more than 50% in the past decade. The Post Office attributes this decline to shifting consumer preferences, especially for bill payment. The days when it was normal behavior for consumers to sit down once a month and review paper statements, write stacks of checks, stuff the checks in return envelopes, then stamp the envelopes and drop them into the mail are rapidly disappearing. Patients' strong preference for paying electronically is both an opportunity and a threat to your practice business. Give patients an easy way to pay online -- better yet, give them electronic statements, too -- and you'll get paid faster, with less labor required, and reduced paper and postage costs, all while making patients happier. Now that's some serious upside! But if you don't make online payments possible, you're also risking getting paid more slowly, with higher collection costs. That's because it's not just a matter of patients preferring to pay online. They're organizing their budgets and managing their money in

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:46-08:00July 21st, 2018|

Fix the problem, not the blame [practice management tip: operations and workflow]

“Fix the problem, not the blame” is a well-known Japanese proverb. It sounds like common sense – isn’t fixing problems what we all ultimately want? But when mistakes happen, the search for culprits instinctively begins – and with it often comes demoralization and tension. Worse, the search for a scapegoat usually won’t keep problems from recurring. Bad systems create more problems than bad employees. When workflow is faulty, the mistakes are built into the process. Figuring out who was working the process when it failed does nothing to prevent failure in the future. As organizations grow and silos (i.e., departments) form, so do opportunities for workflow inefficiencies to masquerade as staff incompetence. We’ve worked with medical practices that have grown so fast, they haven’t noticed their processes aren’t keeping up. But even more than growth, market evolution has put new tasks on everyone’s plate. These tasks may not fit well with jobs as originally configured – and that may mean more errors. Here’s a common example. Insurance has become increasingly complex for patients and staff alike. Higher deductibles have also made front desk collections a priority, but it’s a new priority added on top of everything else. Are front desk employees already trying to answer phones, check patients in, answer questions, collect demographic information, and verify insurance? When patients are seen and it turns out they weren’t covered or aware they owe a deductible, it may seem “obvious” that the front desk staff is to blame – especially to your billers, who must deal with the errors. But more likely, front desk employees are simply juggling too much. As jobs evolve, mistakes may increase. Resentments can fester between departments. But the answer isn’t to find someone to blame – it’s to find out where the process breaks down. In the case of the front desk, a better response would be to reconfigure roles, to let staff focus on the tasks in front of them, without multitasking. As work gets more complex, making people feel embarrassed and afraid won’t help them do their jobs better – retraining staff and refining their

By Morgan|2018-06-11T16:36:02-08:00June 27th, 2018|

Technology for patients: Think good, not perfect

(c) Barclays PLC* A few days ago, the ATM turned 50. The first ATM in the world debuted in London in 1967; we got our first one in the US in 1969. Wow! I bet that the ATM has been around longer than many of you reading this. It's hard to imagine a time when this technology wasn't on every street corner. Yet when the ATM was first introduced, it was slow to catch on. In fact, it took about 30 of those 50 years for the ATM to be used by 2/3 of consumers -- and even as recently as 2013, more than 10% of consumers still had yet to pick up the ATM habit. The ATM's slow-but-steady path to everyday use got me thinking about technology in the medical practice. Technologies to connect patients and practices, especially on the administrative side, have emerged at a fantastic pace in the past few years. But many practices we've worked with have hesitated to implement them, for fear that the majority of their patients won't use them. Some practices that have implemented, say, a patient portal or online scheduling, have been disappointed because only a portion of patients seem excited to use it. "Laurie," they say, "we tried that. Only 20% of our patients used it. It was a failure, so we abandoned it." But when the ATM was first introduced, the adoption rate was much slower even than a 10% or 20% utilization your practice might see on its new payment portal or online schedule. So why didn't the banks give up? After all, implementing an ATM network is a massive, risky, very costly undertaking. So why were the banks undeterred by their meager initial results? And what can we learn from it for our own technology initiatives? The key is to focus less on the people who don't try the technology, and more on the people who do. For every one of those few customers who used the ATM in those early days, the bank could declare a victory. The consumer who wanted to use an ATM

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:48-08:00July 4th, 2017|

Technology’s magic trick: making duplicate effort disappear

Technology for the medical practice front office has many benefits. It can speed up processes, keep critical data safe from fire and flood, allow practice staff to tap resources from other organizations via the Internet, and so on. The list is long and growing. But my favorite front office technology benefit by far is the ability to eliminate duplicate effort, especially duplicate data entry. The reason is simple: eliminating duplicate effort is like money in the bank! When you cut down on duplicate data entry, you don't just eliminate the cost of repeating steps; you also reduce errors, which can be even more costly to find and fix. Some errors -- like mistakes in patient demographics or coding -- cause a direct hit to the bottom line, since they affect billing and reimbursement. Get those demographics right the first time, and your likelihood of getting paid promptly just went up -- and the effort required to make it happen just went down. There are many technology tools that medical front offices can use to reduce duplicate effort. Here are just a few that most practices should explore, if you're not taking advantage of them already. EHR/PMS integration. When a practice moves from separate billing and EHR systems, or from paper charts to an EHR that integrates with the billing/practice management system, the gain in billing efficiency is profound. An integrated EHR/PMS set-up allows physicians and other clinicians to transmit superbills electronically from the EHR into the PMS. This means no data entry of CPT and diagnosis codes from paper tickets -- a huge time savings. But even more important, the data that's transferred over to the billing system is exactly what the physician or non-physician provider intended -- not what the biller guessed at based on a handwritten superbill. And if there are any doubts about the services provided or diagnosis codes, the chart note is right there in the system to provide clarification. EHR/PMS integration means faster, more accurate billing -- for faster, more reliable reimbursement. Fewer delays to clarify what's supposed to be billed, and no risk that

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:54-08:00November 10th, 2016|

Appreciating the art of the possible

I stumbled upon this quote by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently: I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress. This makes so much sense for any enterprise. If you're stuck, try chipping away at the easiest part of a problem. It also strikes me as especially relevant to front office tasks and automation in medical practices. The need to embrace automation, to use technology better, to provide more self-service, etc., is, I think, becoming more understood in practices of all sizes. But that doesn't make the thought of these things any less daunting! Practice managers and physicians may hear "technology" and immediately think, "Oh no, not that again." Visions of EHR implementations that wreaked havoc are vivid and pretty easily recalled. It can be hard to imagine an ROI large enough to make reliving that pain seem worthwhile. But in the front office tech space, many solutions are emerging that are easy to implement -- either wholesale or in parts. And ticking off just one box at a time can give your practice business a boost, even if you're not ready to take on a full-scale automation overhaul. For example, payment portals and email statements have become much easier to implement. Many PMS vendors offer these as built-in tools. Activating these features may (literally) take only a few moments. And if even just one patient finds the convenience encourages him to pay more promptly, the effort you and your team invested will likely be repaid. One of the very best things about how technology for the front office is evolving is that there are more and more targeted solutions to specific, costly problems. You usually don't have to engage in a massive conversion to a new platform to take advantage of any one solution. Chipping away at front office inefficiencies by trying one or more new technologies is a very realistic way to tackle problems that seem very complicated and daunting when taken as a whole.

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:55-08:00July 21st, 2016|

Avoiding insurance errors, problems tops the list of medical billing priorities

Capko & Morgan has had the honor of collaborating with the MedData Group on several recent MedData Point surveys. This month, we worked together on one of our favorite subjects: billing and collections. The results may reflect some subtle but interesting changes to recent trends. For the past few years, it has seemed that the dramatic increase in patient payment responsibility was the focus for most practices. According to this new survey, patient payments are still a very pressing concern for most practices (53%). But this issue was edged out for the top concern by coding errors and other denial causes, which 59% of respondents considered very pressing. We wonder if this is related to narrowing of networks, increasing pre-authorization demands from some payers (mentioned by 49% as a pressing issue), lingering ICD-10 issues, or some combination of the three. Not surprisingly, AR and bad debt are still top-of-mind medical billing problems (49%). We were a bit surprised, though, that preparing for new payment models was only a pressing concern for about a quarter (28%) of respondents. But the CMS is also projecting that most practices will hold off on alternatives to fee-for-service payment, at least for now. Only 25% of respondents put adding or enhancing billing technology on the list of key concerns. We’d love to see more practices take advantage of the growing array of innovative, affordable tools to improve collections from patients and health plans alike. These results seem consistent, though, with what we found in another recent MedData Point survey: practices may not be aware of all the new front office solutions that can make their practices more efficient and profitable. Our consulting group is delighted when we get the opportunity to help practices get more from technology, including systems they've already invested in, especially to improve billing and revenue capture. Contact us if you'd like to explore how we can help.

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:55-08:00July 20th, 2016|

Are you missing out on excellent solutions to front office challenges?

Capko & Morgan recently collaborated with MedData Group* on a physician survey about front office technology awareness and plans. The results seemed to confirm what we see among our clients: many physicians are unaware of the full array of excellent innovations that have recently emerged to support the medical practice front office. Check out this chart from the infographic that MedData created from the survey data. It's interesting to see that even the tools that are most commonplace, check-in tablets and automated reminders, widely available for a decade or more, still barely passed 50% awareness. This is consistent with what we experience when we talk to practice administrators and physicians about front office technology solutions. Often, administrators and physicians also assume that such tools are aimed primarily at large health systems or hospitals and aren't affordable or even feasible for independent practices -- but this is not the case. As technology has proliferated among consumers, so have ways to use it to make working with your practice more convenient for patients, and to make processes more efficient for you. For example, studies from other industries have shown that consumers mostly prefer to pay electronically, and reward the businesses that let them do so with more loyalty and more reliable and prompt payment. Most practice management systems offer email statements, payment portals, and other tools that make offering online payments very easy, but practices too often assume that implementation will be difficult. It usually isn't complicated at all -- in fact, we've worked with two different practices recently that were able to get their online payments solutions up and running within an afternoon. These practices found money waiting for them, deposited via online payments from patients, when they arrived at the office the very first morning after implementation! There are many other front office technology solutions that can help practices enormously, but that aren't getting the attention that they should. These tools can make some of the most frustrating and tedious practice challenges -- no-shows, patient collections, payment plans, front desk paperwork -- a lot more manageable. And they impress patients

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:57-08:00February 11th, 2016|

Ready for the deductible re-set?

It's almost that time again: deductibles re-set in less than a month. Got your game face on? For many practices, the end of the year is so busy, it's hard to think about planning for slow business in January, February and March. Ironically, the cause of the busyness in Q4 is related to the cause of slower demand in January: deductibles. At year end, patients are eager to bring any known problems or elective procedures in to practices, because their deductibles have been met or nearly so; in January, many patients delay care because their deductibles re-set to their original amounts (or even higher amounts in many cases). It may also seem like there's little you can do to deal with the deductible re-set. But you do have options, and making even a small dent in the downturn can make a big difference in overall profitability. So isn't it worth trying? If you're in a pediatrics, adult primary care, or OB/GYN practice, of course one of the best steps you can take to smooth your revenue is to let patients know you have availability for preventive services in the beginning of the year. Let them know that your practice may be less crowded (barring, of course, a wave of flu or another virus coming through your neck of the woods). Make sure patients are aware that preventive services usually come with no copayment or deductible. (It can be helpful to create a list of common tests and vaccines that are preventive per the USPSTF, to avoid confusion.) Here's where your EHR can shine: use list-generating capabilities to identify patients that are due for preventive services, or who have chronic conditions are overdue for a regular visit. For example, it's usually easy to isolate healthy patients you rarely see that are overdue for pap smears, hepatitis screening or check-ups. Tapping your system a little more creatively, you can identify patients that have just crossed a threshold to qualifying for a preventive service such as herpes zoster, pneumococcal pneumonia vaccine or cancer screening. Patients that turned 65 in 2015 may also be identified and offered an

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:58-08:00December 8th, 2015|

Ready to take the CCM plunge?

As you may know already, I've been working on a series of papers on Medicare's chronic care management reimbursement program (CCM) for the Medical Product Guide. (Click on 'resources' after visiting the Medical Product Guide link if you're interested -- they're free.) Talking to practices that have already started working on CCM, along with others that have held back, has been a learning experience. The ability to take on CCM quickly depends a lot on your current practice set-up and, especially, your EHR. On the current set-up side, if you're working on or already have set up a medical home (PCMH), and have one or more case managers in place to support it, you may find it easy to use the same staff structure for CCM. Your case managers could become the coordinators for CCM as well -- perhaps personally contacting patients and doing the other care management tasks that contribute to the required 20 minutes per month for billing. Perhaps there will be overlap between the PCMH and CCM that could be beneficial -- if, for example, you're looking at a similar mix of conditions, that might allow for some standardized communications or tracking tools. Or perhaps you could add a group visit program that would serve patients from both programs. (A group visit program wouldn't contribute to the CCM monthly time requirement, since that's strictly non-face-to-face time, but it still could be well received, and fit with the patient engagement goal of the program.) On the other hand, if your practice hasn't yet taken on PCMH, CCM could be a stepping stone. Many primary care practices believe they're already doing many of the tasks that are meant to be compensated by CCM -- they're just not tracking them, and they haven't had a way to bill for them, either. That last problem is expressly addressed by CCM -- the key is solving the former problem of tracking. EHR vendors vary dramatically in this area. Some have already created dedicated modules that allow for templates for clinical staff contacts to be tracked, and for the time to be calculated. Others

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:51:58-08:00October 31st, 2015|

If you missed Laurie’s webinar, “Front Desk Collections: the New Linchpin of Profitability,” here’s how to watch it now

If you missed Laurie's webinar, "Front Desk Collections: the New Linchpin of Profitability" (sponsored by Wellero) -- one of her most popular webinars ever! -- you're still in luck. Sign up here and watch it whenever you like. This practical presentation hits on some ways you can immediately increase profitability while avoiding pitfalls that can erode your practice's financial health. Take a look (it's free to sign up), and, if you have questions or comments after watching, please don't hesitate to contact Laurie. [yks-mailchimp-list id="87d94b707e" submit_text="Submit"]

By Morgan|2022-01-01T22:52:03-08:00October 27th, 2014|