Twenty Percent. This is how much of your practice or facility’s collections you are allowing payers to keep if you are not properly tracking and pursuing medical billing denials. This is a lot of money during the best of times, but particularly during tough economic times. Your practice needs an effective Revenue Cycle Denial Management system if you want to recapture this lost income.

Some medical billers believe denial management is the same as follow-up, others believe denial management is primarily geared towards dealing with issues around medical necessity. Many medical billing experts simply think as denial management as a description for the overall medical billing process.

A good start to finding out if your practice is suffering from improper denial management is to find out from your medical billing service (or in-house medical billing manager) how they manage denials and how they measure success in this area.

It is amazing how few medical billers or medical billing companies understand how proper denial management will dramatically increase the revenue of a practice. They understand the value of working denials, but this is not the only secret to good denial management. Working denials is like bailing water from a leaking ship – it can help keep the ship afloat, but ultimately you really need to fix the leak.

The system accomplishes this needed service by tracking, quantifying, and reporting on every claim billed for which any payer denied the service. The reporting should be comprehensive, tracking all denials (not just selected denials). If used properly, the system can reduce first-time claim denials by over 50 percent. Many practices have no way of monitoring if payers are denying their claims at excessive or unwarranted rates, or even for what reason. These practices are probably losing 10 to 20 percent of their total revenue.

Although many practice management systems can properly track claim denial information, few systems have the rare combination of having been both properly implemented to track the data and properly understood to extract the data in a meaningful manner. Without both of these elements the denial management process cannot properly provide the feedback on denials that is required. Even when this information is present, often there is no mechanism for feeding the information back into the medical billing process to correct billing problems.

A proper medical billing denial management system tracks every claim that has denied and can report this by payer, by CPT, by physician and by diagnosis. This information must be presented in a manner that allows fast identification of trends. With this powerful combination in hand, the medical billing department of medical billing service can then utilizes claim rules and edits that are specific enough to dramatically drive up the first pass claim acceptance and stop the flood of denied claims.

With the analytical capabilities available, the medical billing department or medical billing company can identify systemic medical billing problems, create and test solutions to the problems and implement process changes that will increase collections AND drive down medical billing costs. One example of this is pursuit of Clean Claim Law violators with the denial data produced from the denial management system.

As previously mentioned, an effective denial management system is critical for your practice if you want to improve your medical billing and hasten your collections. Implementation of the proper system can easily increase collections by more than 10% and could even exceed a 20% increase in collections.

Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II