Importance of A/R Follow-up in Medical Billing

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Importance of A/R Follow-up

Medical billing is a complicated process that requires special skills in medical billing, coding, denial, and AR management from experienced and well-trained staff. The financial health and success of any medical practice are dependent on maintaining positive cash flow. In order to provide patient care and cover expenses, it’s important that payments are not delayed, lost, or denied. With the understanding of billing guidelines and a highly trained staff in place, you’ll start to reap the benefits of high first-pass acceptance rates and shorter billing cycles. But even when everything goes right, some claims will still be rejected or denied. The accounts receivable (A/R) follow-up team in a healthcare organization is responsible for looking after such denied claims and reopening them to receive rightful reimbursement from the insurance carriers. Even though these claims could be held up by simple mistakes, you will be surprised to know that over half of denied or rejected claims are never reworked. This means that the average healthcare provider is leaving thousands of unclaimed dollars on the table every year. In this article, we highlighted some key benefits and overall importance of A/R follow-up in medical billing. 

Importance of A/R Follow-up in Medical Billing

Claim follow-up: It may be possible that all submitted claims are not received by the insurance carrier or your billing team might have missed submitting some claims. One of the biggest delays in payment is resulting from the claim not getting filed. In simpler words, the claim wasn’t received by the insurance carrier. This normally happens after paper claims get lost or misplaced somewhere along the way before they are delivered. To avoid such blunders, it’s wise to send claims electronically if you can. In case the claim has not been followed up on quickly, it could be weeks or longer before your firm realizes that the insurance firm never received your claim. For paper claims, 10 business days pass prior to calling the insurance firm to confirm whether the claim was received.

Managing denied claims: Depending on the denial reason, you can actually send out a new claim request with all required corrections before you even receive the paper denial via mail. By contacting the insurance firm and inquiring why they denied your claim rather than waiting for your paper denial explaining the reason through the mail, the A/R team can make sure that all claims get corrected as fast as possible. Resubmitting the claims up to 7 days earlier instead of waiting for the mail will undoubtedly reduce the turnaround time for your payments.

Recover overdue payments: A/R follow-ups assist all nursing homes, physicians, hospitals, etc. in recovering late payments without a hassle. When the healthcare provider has a team that can constantly involve itself in the claims follow-up procedures, it becomes stress-free for the healthcare provider to receive payments in a timely manner. Your experienced, skilled team will read the explanation of benefits and will resubmit the claim with the required information to receive overdue payments.