Coverage Discovery Services
Much of the revenue lost to uncompensated care is simply due to patients being uninsured or underinsured. Another part is simply never billed due to carelessness or overwhelmed in-house medical billing staff. But it is estimated that up to 10% of the self-pay accounts that get written off are actually covered by billable insurance or a government health care program. This represents a significant amount of providers’ revenue that, up until now, has been difficult to recover.
Coverage Discovery Services Increase Revenue
The amount of revenue that has been lost due to uncompensated care is in the hundreds of billions. METACARE Coverage Discovery team tracks down coverage that patients may not even know they have and gets all possible reimbursements for our clients.
What’s Behind The Lost Revenue
The source of all this potential increased revenue is coverage that patients may not even know they have. Young adults may not realize they are still covered under a parent’s plan. Another fairly common situation is a person not realizing they are covered under a plan arranged by their spouse
If they know about a secondary coverage, they often assume you receive the information when you look up their primary coverage. Medicaid and Medicare, with all their various parts, are challenging enough for professionals to deal with. It’s understandable that recipients, who are often either elderly or disabled, would not do the research it takes to sort it all out, and would assume your medical billing staff would automatically have access to the information needed to figure out what all their coverage is.
How METACARE Coverage Discovery Service Works
With METACARE providing your laboratory medical billing solutions, you are relieved of the time-consuming and often tedious work, but will still know exactly what’s going on with your revenue. Our reports are presented regularly, and are designed to keep you abreast of several key performance indicators (KPIs). You will see how long it is taking to get paid and how the accounts-receivable balance is doing relative to the value of services provided, for example. You will see that you are getting paid faster and the proportion of unpaid bills gets smaller after working with us.
Benefits of Using Coverage Discovery
- Identifies all levels of coverage to maximize reimbursement
- Decreases days in AR
- Decreases number of accounts sent to collections or written off
- Reduces cost of collections for unpaid bills
- Reduces overall bad debt
- Increases patient satisfaction
Improve Front-end Eligibility and Benefit Verification
The Coverage Discovery process starts at the beginning of the medical revenue cycle with eligibility verification. Nearly a third of claim denials and rejections are due to errors right up front, before patients are even seen by the provider. Improving registration and verification processes provides the opportunity to greatly improve revenue. Some of the ways Coverage Discovery benefits the front-office process include:
- Streamlines staff interaction with patients
- Increases front-end collections
- Establishes correct code matching
- Provides guidance to staff
- Reduces rejections and denials
Minimize Bad Debt and Write-Offs
There will always be patients who can’t afford the full cost of medical care, but by having correct information, providing patients the costs up front, and billing all responsible payers, more of your earned revenue can be collected. Now there is no reason to let services go unbilled because it isn’t clear who to bill.
Why Choose Our Medical Billing Solutions
Efficient Registration Process
Having a more efficient registration process makes it easier for your staff to get correct information so that they can speak knowledgeably to patients. The better your patients understand their bill and financial responsibility, the more likely you are to get paid. In many cases, patients are unable to pay the cost of medical care, but knowing what’s coming and working out a payment plan can increase the part that you do collect, and keeps patients much more comfortable with the billing process.
Qualified Billing Staff
Billing staff benefit from having the correct insurer/payer information. Code matching helps to ensure the claims are approved when they are submitted. It also makes it easier to get them filled out since the appropriate codes have already been identified.
METACARE has been providing customized revenue cycle management services to the medical industry for over a decade. Our focus on meeting the unique needs of each of our clients has resulted in satisfied customers who enjoy the benefits of working with a full-service medical billing company.
If you have any questions, please give us a call at (617) 383-4063. If you find it hard to believe that you could pay us to provide coverage discovery and billing services and still have more revenue, click here to get a free demo. We’d love to show you how it works.