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Is the Reputation of Your HME or DME at Stake Because of Poor Medical Billing?

by | February 20, 2020 | 10:28 am
Category : Medical Billing

Mistakes in medical billing can jeopardize the reputation of your medical practice and hurt patient loyalty. The trust deficit created due to inaccurate medical billing can be irreparable.

According to the 2019 Patient Payment Technology Report, based on a survey of 1000 U.S. healthcare consumers, only 33% of consumers expressed confidence in the accuracy of the bill provided by their hospital/ caregiver, while 47% reported facing a billing or payment issue in their recent healthcare experience.

Patient billing is a critical part of maintaining your HME’s brand loyalty and retention. Errors in billing can translate into financial losses. In addition, the damage to your reputation and brand loyalty of your medical practice could cause 42% of patients to consider seeking care from an alternative provider.

With peer reviews and recommendations easily available, medical providers, with anything less than 100% reliable medical billing/payment, are at risk of losing prospective patients before they even start. Moreover, regaining customer trust and goodwill after a data breach is increasingly difficult.

Medical billing is challenging for small DMEs and technology is key for payers to enable the best possible automation processes, necessary for accuracy and speed. Being able to set aside dedicated resources is very hard, as is finding an extra few hours in your day. Therefore, HMEs are going to have to look at every way possible to automate the back-end revenue cycle process and work on increasing reliability to instill confidence and trust.

According to the 2019 Healthcare Consumer Study of 1,607 online respondents, 49% said they were frustrated with their physician’s hesitation in adopting digital administrative processes. 1 in 3 respondents says physicians have not done enough to improve billing and payment processes while 74% of the respondents said their physicians notify them of their bills by traditional mail. The survey reveals that 1 in 5 patients said they have dropped a physician due to poor digital experience and 41% said they’d consider switching to a provider who offered a better experience.

While over 45% considered their post-visit experience with billing and insurance follow-ups to be tortuous, an additional 38% feel that pre-visit processes such as scheduling, co-pays, check-in, and cost estimate are worse. Failure to stay up-to-date on medical billing rules and regulations, in addition to billing errors, can devastate your practice’s efficiency and reputation.

More often than not, it is the lack of expertise in insurance billing and medical coding, poor reporting and human error that lead to huge revenue losses for HMEs. With reports that 90% of denials are preventable and two-thirds are recoverable, streamlining revenue cycle management to reduce the administrative burden on providers and reduce medical billing errors is the key to increase trust and give patients more transparent, easy billing.

However, medical billing is demanding and challenging for small DMEs and doing it all in-house can be a major investment of time and resources. Therefore many HMEs choose to outsource their medical office billing to a trusted medical billing company like Analytix.  Analytix Solutions works with HME practices to streamline and optimize medical billing processes. Additionally, we are HIPAA compliant, possess an ISO certification for secure data, and offer flexible engagement models and payment structures.

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