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Improving AR Days with Claim Follow-up

by | October 31, 2019 | 1:39 pm
Category : Claims Denial Management

High AR (Account Receivable) days are red flags that can negatively impact the bottom line of your practice. According to hospital benchmarks, AR days for facilities are 47.5 days, and anything above that means less money to hire quality staff, fewer margins, and capital for expansion. Regular, proactive follow-up of outstanding claims is critical to improve medical AR daysand efficient medical billing services. Thus, the lower the number of AR days, the faster you get paid and the healthier are the operations.

Therefore, it is important to have your AR team follow-up all the pending claims, investigate claim denials, and track receivables and payments in a systematic manner by answering these three questions:

Was the claim received?

Proactively researching claim status is very critical. The sooner you are aware that a claim was not received by the insurance company, the faster a corrective action can be taken. Once you have filed a claim after the necessary insurance verification process, you must allow 5 days before calling for follow-up. On your follow-up, you get confirmation that the claim has been received and is in process of either being paid or denied.  Once a determination is made and EOB (explanation of benefits) is issued in 30-45 days.  To avoid timely rejections, tracking denials and actively working to resolve them keeps AR low.  Regular follow-up further helps you avoid instances of duplicate claim denials.  

Has the claim been denied?

Get a head start in researching the exact reasons for claim denial by calling the insurance company. Utilizing phase between inquiry to respond, you can identify and correct the error depending on the reason why the claim was denied in the first place. This helps cut short the AR days and turnaround time for claim reimbursement.

Is there any pending information?

Often, claims get rejected due to incorrect or invalid information that does not match with the submitted file. While the insurance company could possibly contact the provider as well as the patient for the additional information, it is generally a good practice to be proactive in follow-up, with both the insurance company and the patient, to ensure that pending claims are quickly resolved.

Managing AR days and billing can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Outsourcing it to a medical billing company gives you access to a team of skilled specialists and the latest technology which helps you streamline the account receivable follow-up process. Analytix’s experienced Medical Billing team collaborates with DME and HME practices and businesses to optimize account receivables and revenue cycle management. We are HIPAA compliant, possess an ISO certification for secure data, and offer flexible engagement models and payment structures.

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