Most laboratories in the country have a hard time keeping up with the daily tasks associated with basic medical billing functions. They don’t have the procedures, time, or protocols to aggressively follow-up on outstanding funds.
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What are Laboratory Billing Services?
We can define laboratory billing services as centralized billing services for clinical laboratories to help execute medical claims submission procedures as well as collect payments from health insurance companies. Note that laboratory billing professionals are certified specialists who help the clinical labs’ employees work as efficiently and quickly as possible while maintaining the highest service levels.
Unlike standard billing and coding professionals, these experts consider the unique needs and requirements of clinical laboratories.
How Laboratories Differ from Hospitals and Clinics
You should know that the unique field of lab medical billing is unlike hospitals, physicians, or DME billing specialties. The field uses a specific set of CPT codes. As compared to a hospital, physician’s office, or urgent care facility, labs have more patients. Note that these patients will come to follow their doctor’s prescription for medical tests.
UControlBilling’s laboratory billing services cover every aspect of medical RCM (revenue cycle management), such as payer credentialing and AR collection. UControlBilling understands that reference and clinical laboratories in the US face a daunting number of challenges.
It is worth noting that the complexity of clinical lab billing, ever-increasing and changing regulatory demands, and inadequate legacy applications can often impede growth, hindering the success and profitability of your business.
Why Laboratories Outsource Medical Billing to UControlBilling
Improved Cash Flow and Lower Operating Costs
There is no doubt that maintaining a lab billing department in-house involves the associated initial and ongoing training costs, software fees, and employee salaries. Did you know that the overhead costs of the US healthcare system can balloon to about $190 billion?
This is why cutting your overhead expenses by outsourcing your medical billing is an excellent way to lower expenditures while improving cash flow.
Transparency
You may know that understanding and evaluating your laboratory’s performance can be pretty challenging. As data is buried in antiquated systems and spreadsheets, it is usually difficult and time-consuming to gather the information needed to optimize operations.
To help labs meet this challenge, UControlBilling provides you with the latest and most advanced financial and analytical tools. These tools give enhanced visibility of your operations, capturing critical data and relevant metrics for regulatory reporting and internal benchmarking.
HIPAA Compliant Billing Services
UControlBilling provides HIPAA compliant and reliable medical billing services for labs. From a business perspective, their team can conduct a risk assessment within your organization. Their certified and experienced medical billing specialists are also well-versed in HIPAA protocols and guidelines.
UControlBilling safeguards your PHI (protected health information) with a highly-secure communication network.
Reporting and Analytics
UControlBilling’s laboratory medical billing reporting is simple and highly intuitive, granting instant access to essential data. This will allow you to track performance as well as make sound decisions.
You will be happy to know that qualitative assessment becomes simpler and easier as you can quickly review everything, such as which payers reimburse.
Maximize Reimbursement
UControlBilling’s expert medical billing for laboratory services includes timely scrubbing and submitting medical claims within a couple of days and tracking all medical claims until they’re paid. This results in increased revenue.
Automatic Verification
Did you know that improper verification and eligibility are the leading causes of claims denial? Note that if you currently use in-house medical staff to verify insurance coverage and medical necessity, you may benefit from outsourcing your verification services to improve accuracy.
This will also reduce the number of hours you devote to procedures more easily managed by a reliable automated system.
Factors that Negatively Impact Laboratory Billing Services
Here are some of the key factors that can affect lab billing services negatively, causing obstacles in your revenue collection procedure.
Incorrect Patient Information
You may know that documentation is one of the important steps in revenue cycle management. If your front desk employees don’t collect accurate and complete information from your patients about insurance coverage and demographics, it will likely cause a series of errors.
Did you know that a single incorrect letter or digit can cause you to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars? Also, these errors and mistakes can slow down your laboratory billing services quite a bit.
Ineffective Denial Management
If you don’t handle denial management properly, it can lead to a delay in revenue. If you submit a claim to an insurance company for payment and the company denies it, you can suffer a loss. This is why practitioners must consider denial management as a key part of lab billing services.
Note that an adequate denial management system helps resolve problems and issues with denied claims. Also, if you identify an issue with patient information or find any documentation errors, you should request your patients to provide you with updated information.
However, if you don’t manage and optimize your denial recovery system, it may lead to unnecessary payment delays. The best thing is that you can use adequate billing software to improve denial management at your lab.
Inactive Insurance Plans
Your lab personnel should obtain updated insurance policy information in order to submit accurate bills to your payer. Keep in mind that if a patient submits an inactive insurance card, it can considerably slow down the entire procedure, and you don’t want that.
On the other hand, if a patient isn’t eligible for a specific service from your lab, he should deal with their insurance payers. Remember that if you find out later that the patient is no longer covered by the insurance plan or has provided incorrect insurance details, you won’t be able to receive payment for your services. And it will adversely affect your bottom line.
Partner with UControlBilling
Because of increasing demand, there is incredible potential for healthcare practices to boost their income and profits. Is your medical laboratory generating sufficient revenue to achieve its business objectives and goals? If not, it is best that you make the most of medical billing services.
In this respect, UControlBilling offers you an all-in-one solution that will help you overcome the various challenges associated with lab medical billing. The company is focused on driving higher financial conversions for medical laboratories with greater insights. For more information, visit www.ucontrolbilling.com.
Final Thoughts
It is no secret that medical laboratories in the US have to strive to get more foot traffic compared to doctor’s offices and hospitals. This is where lab medical billing staff provides an effective and efficient means to drive financial growth.
Also, keep in mind that the best laboratory billing software allows you to monitor and assess all your patient claims in real-time. This makes it convenient and quick to identify errors and rectify the medical claims instantly.
However, note that regardless of the specific software your lab uses, managed lab billing services from a reliable company, such as UControlBilling, are an ideal solution to rectify and analyze issues. The best thing is that outsourcing your lab medical billing can result in swift resolution of many billing processes and supplies better data.