The debate on whether technology has eased our work or added to the woes is a topic which has no definite answer. In the healthcare industry, the jury is still out on whether IT advances are helping practices to achieve more with whatever they have or are slowing down the process.
In the healthcare industry, a big part of the confusion happens in the area of medical billing as it is the common link between the patient, physician, payer, and pharmacy, among others. This complexity necessitated electronic billing.
Through electronic medical billing, practices and patients can browse through their medical bills which are submitted electronically. Moreover, they can easily follow up with the health insurance companies to receive imbursement for medical services delivered by a healthcare practice.
There are a number of reasons why you should take advantage of an electronic medical billing service. However, we have tried to list out just the top 8 reasons to explain why electronic medical billing is an obvious choice.
1. Green option – With electronic billing, you definitely stop using paper and save more trees. Hence, making it the green option.
2. No mess management – Every time you are in search of a file, you have to browse through a hundred other irrelevant papers. Even if the files are sorted in a particular order like date, location or alphabets, you still waste some time finding the relevant file. When your bills are on the electronic version, you don’t have to have any of your data in the hard copy format. All you have to do is type a search word and click. It’s a no-nonsense management option.
3. Unconscious process – Practices should spend more time increasing their knowledge about their patients and the industry. With electronic medical billing system, the process is such that a patient’s data is linked automatically to the billing system. This saves time and eliminates any room for confusion and duplication.
4. No room for erroneous medical bills – While a number of health insurance companies delay the disbursement of insurance amount, many practices take a lot of time to decide if a particular treatment is covered by the insurance or not. When you have electronic medical billing system linked to your EMR software, you can easily check the insurance eligibility of the patient in real-time. So no more erroneous bills.
5. Create precise reports – Making mistakes is human, but machines rarely make mistakes, unless there is a bug within the system. The reports generated through electronic medical billing will be precise and accurate. In case of any doubt, you can even acquire data in the form of charts which could be linked to the accounting system.
6. Makes it affordable – Paper is more expensive than electronic. When you go online, you don’t just save on your paper expenses but also on the manpower. An electronic version needs very few staff and the data management is also eased.
7. Template oriented – An electronic medical billing helps practices focus on the patients more than anything else. As the data is available with just a find and click button, physicians can spend less time understanding each case. The templates also help in updating the data with minimal intrusion.
8. Personalization – Each patient’s medical history is different from the other. Although with paper bills tracking is difficult, with the electronic version you can personalize each patient history based on their personal details, hometown, medical history, insurance policy, sensitivity and other vital information.
Many payers are now requiring electronic filing of claims. Pretty soon it will not be possible to continue using paper to file claims with payers.
Electronic medical billing systems enable physicians to spend more time understanding their patients and the required treatment. It brings down the time spent on unproductive work. It also keeps a physician updated about the trending topics of healthcare industry and the changing laws associated to patient’s insurance.
Electronic medical billing is empowering the healthcare industry across the globe. More healthcare professionals are using electronic medical billing systems, improving the chances that payers will actually pay for their services faster.