Monday, April 9, 2012

Cardiologists Need Specialized Cardiovascular Billing Services


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Medical billing is a crucial health care service that supports physicians by submitting and collecting the payments from insurance companies and patients. One needs to be an expert to ensure that the bills are collected fully and in a timely fashion. It is quite common for over 20% of a practice's potential revenue to remain unclaimed because of improper coding and weak collection strategies. Outsourcing medical billing is growing in popularity as an approach for addressing this tremendous loss of practice income. The range of outsourcing options runs from extremely large organizations to individual freelancers who work from home to provide medical billing services.

Medical billing is a highly complex area and it requires experience-based knowledge and expertise to contend with insurance companies. When it comes to cardiovascular billing, the situation gets even more complex. Such complexity can be handled only by a company that is staffed with well trained cardiology billing professionals. The medical billing specialist must be familiar with the specific codes and rules that make up the world of cardiac billing. Cardiovascular coding and cardiac billing cannot be done by everyone, it is a highly specialized field and it is not possible to be successful in collecting the bills fully from the insurance companies without the proper skills and training.

As the cost of providing cardiology related healthcare services continues to rise, medical institutions and cardiology practices cannot afford to leave revenue uncollected by billing companies or freelancers that are not knowledgeable in cardio billing. It is also important to keep in mind some companies may promote themselves as large cardiac billing service providers but in reality they sub-contract the cardiovascular billing to freelancers who work from home. Hiring such companies will lead to lost revenue because of the lack of proper process, controls, and training.

One of the major drawbacks of hiring a company that does not specialize in cardiology billing is their lack of familiarity with the procedures and the terminologies used. Even if the medical billing company serves one or two cardiologists, they will lack the depth and breadth of expertise required for successful cardiology billing. Moreover if the hired company does not specialize in cardiovascular billing, then they will not have the expertise to effectively appeal denied claims or answer questions raised by the insurance companies. A company that does not encompass a wide range of cardiology billing experience will find it difficult to track underpayments since multiple procedure rules, nuclear camera rules and cardiology procedures have significantly more complicated contractual adjustment rules than a typical family doctor or internist's claims. In addition, the billing software and system design of a generalist billing company will often be insufficient for the more complicated requirements of reporting and insurance follow-up required in cardiology billing.

These billing complications extend to the patient collections arena as well. The patient collection process for specialists like cardiologists is more complicated because of the large patient balances often owed, the complexity of the procedures/EOBs that must be explained to patients that do not understand their bills and the typically older population cardiologists serve. A medical billing service with expertise in cardiology billing knows how to deal with these situations. Billing services without such experience will increase the risk of both lower patient collections and upset patients confused about their bill.

To avoid all these billing related pitfalls cardiologists need to utilize specialized cardiology billing services. It is not advisable for an internist to perform cardiac surgery, similarly someone without training in cardiovascular coding and cardiology billing is not qualified to offer reliable billing services for cardiovascular practices.

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