I am a “bleeding edge” kind of guy; if a new technology comes out I want it, so the results of this survey are very encouraging to me. I like change; it is what makes business competitive. If you aren’t developing ideas for the future then your growth is bound to become stagnant sooner or later.

The healthcare industry has longed for dramatic changes that can improve efficiency, reduce cost, and increase patient care. Electronic medical records have a long way to go before they can make a dramatic change in our industry, but they are the future of the industry and therefore in my opinion it is better to adopt the system while it is young and for your practice to grow with it rather than letting the industry grow up without your influence.

Are you using EMR in your practice? Do you have plans to implement an EMR system?

Leave a comment below telling us why you have or have not considered implementing EMR in your office.

On Facebook, we recently asked the question; Have you ever paid a medical bill online, and/or would you be comfortable doing so. Our sample of users was very small, with only 5 people participating, but you all marked that you have not paid a medical bill online, but would be willing to do so without reservation.

My next question for you is:

Why haven’t you paid a medical bill online? Is it because your physician doesn’t offer it as a payment method? Please leave your answer in the comments below.

If you haven’t joined us on Facebook please do so by clicking here.

Thank you to everybody that participated in our poll on Facebook. We appreciate every response we get to a question or poll posted on our business page. Our goal is to create a community of users that can help us provide better billing solutions for patients and physicians. If you have have any confusion about a medical bill or think something in the billing process is confusing please let us know and maybe we can help you understand what is being done.

As always please keep any confidential information to yourselves. This is a public website and anything you write can be viewed by anyone.

Using this new technology as a means for marketing your company can be very rewarding.  However; there come inherent privacy risks that face the healthcare industry that will need to be continuously addressed with your staff as you delve into the world of social media.

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times entitled When Facebook goes to the hospital, patients may suffer by Molly Hennessy-Fiske the author describes an example in which hospital employees took pictures of a dying ER patient and posted them to a Facebook account.  As you can imagine this sent quite a stir through the hospital and privacy organizations as HIPAA policy and patient security are of the utmost importance.  The incident was a violation of HIPAA regulations and lapse in common sense, and it resulted in the termination of 4 employees involved.

Although the incident itself is over we, as medical professionals, now have to consider if it is secure for us to use social media to market our companies, and how to protect ourselves and our patients from privacy violations in the future.

Is using social media to market your practice, hospital, or healthcare related business worth the risk and if so what can be done to minimize any risk involved.

Please leave your suggestions and comments below.  I would really like to hear your opinion before I post my methods for secure use of social media in the healthcare industry.

This article was inspired by a tweet from @PrivacyProf on Twitter referencing a recent article in the LA Times. Be sure to follow her if you are in healthcare and using social media to connect with patients and other professionals in the field.

Is Customer Service Your Job?

YES! The customer is always right, right? Well to a certain extent. One thing is always true though… whether they are right or wrong it is your job to serve them. While reading a recent book The Customer Rules, a book about the nations best customer service companies, I realized that the focus of your business can sometime get lost in the fear of assuming liability. But we need not let that fear push customer service outside of the scope of all of our employees job descriptions.

Medical billers are customer service reps. They are here to do data entry, submit claims, post payments, and most of all serve the customer.

You will undoubtedly receive a request at some point from either a patient or a physician that will fall outside the focus of your day to day activities as a biller, but it is still your job to assist them. The answer I don’t know, or that is not my job is never suitable. Although it may not be your job or you may not know you are still responsible for knowing where the answer can be found.

If you receive a question from a physician about credentialing you should NOT give him advice on credentialing, you are not a specialist in that field, but you should know the person in your office that is. Forward the question to your specialist and have them contact the physician with the answer.

When a patient calls and asks if their physician is in network there is no way for you to know the answer, specifically when contracting in involved. But you should be able to give them the number to their insurance company that has access to the information needed to answer the question.

Assuming liability and taking risk is something your employer does not want you to do, but ignoring client requests because you feel that it falls outside of the scope of your job is something that is also frowned upon. It is time to realize that your job as a medical biller expands past just billing and into the field of customer service. You will always have to expand your knowledge base and are expected to be able to serve the customer whenever possible.

Adam M.

A recent discussion on the Medical Biller’s Forum in which I had a pretty good debate about the scope and responsibility of a medical biller has inspired me to write this post. Be sure to check out the boards and join us for more medical billing fun.

The buzz is about government incentives, increased patient care, and reduced cost.

Sounds great doesn’t it? But what is the cost? What qualifies you for the incentives, and how are you going to maintain this new system? For that matter what is EMR?

What are EMR and EHR?

EMR & EHR are abbreviations for the terms electronic medical records and electronic health records.

An electronic health record is basically a digital version of a traditional patient’s file. You know the file that is kept in a physician’s office or on the foot a hospital bed while a patient is being treated. This digital record is part of a greater system known as electronic medical records.

The electronic medical records system helps reduce the necessity of a local paper based copy of a patient’s file. How? Well the idea is that it will allow the information to be saved digitally on a server making access to patient information fast and secure using computers and other electronic devices such as tablet computers, cellular telephones, and PDAs.

This information can be accessed by all of the patient’s physicians allowing for better data flow and increased patient care from wherever the physician is located. A universal patient record could reduce the need for preliminary tests that have already been performed and increase the integrity of the data about a chronic illness a patient might be suffering from.

In my opinion EHRs are a technology that will benefit patients and physicians in a huge way.

What Are The Pros of EMR?

Increase patient care: Yes, imagine a world where a patient’s information can be accessed on the go, where you don’t have to wait for a document to be pulled, and don’t have to hope the notes are legible. That is a world with full support and participation in an EMR program. If you have a trained employee and a sound system you can have just that. An EHR can deliver more info faster which will absolutely improve every patient’s every visit.

Reduced cost: If done right in the long run you can save money with EMR. You remove the cost of printing, filing, and storing paper data. You can reduce staff. And retrieve information quicker. You can accomplish more inside and outside of your office because you have greater access to your patient information.

What Are The Cons of EMR?

Now to contradict my previous statement.The initial cost is high and can remain high if the system isn’t used properly. If you are a physician and you are considering implementing an EMR system I am sure you have run into your first wall. The cost. To purchase the software, lease the hardware, to pay for the hosting fees, and training of an EMR system can cost your practices thousands into hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the size of your practice. You have to pay for security, for licenses for software, for redundancy*, and for the devices to communicate with the system.

You have to have a great internet connection or two. Assuming as a physician you aren’t completely familiar with maintaining an in house network and servers you are going to be hosting your system outside of your office. You are going to be connecting to it via the internet. Now with that cost you met before you paid to make sure your servers are always up and running, but the same precaution needs to be taken with your internet provider. Because if your internet goes down you lose all access to your patient information and that could stop your practice in it’s tracks.

And finally training training training. Without ongoing training of how to use the system correctly your office will be running ineffectively costing you more than what you are benefiting. Implementing an EMR system is going to take a lot of time and effort from both the physician and his/her staff members. If the legwork isn’t put in up front the system will likely be detrimental rather than beneficial.

So with our background of EMR done what’s the buzz? Tell me whats-a-happening.

What are these government incentives for EMR?

The US Government has been proactively involved in pushing new technology from the dawn of the Internet through military research to what is now the EHR. So it comes with no surprise to me that they are willing to pass up to $40,000 in incentives out to providers that are willing to implement the new electronic medical record technology.

But don’t be fooled by it and rush into anything. The government is giving the incentives out over a period of years to providers that demonstrate “meaningful use” of digital records. A generic term for which they haven’t even defined. So before you dive head first into uncharted waters with your practice be sure to do as much research into what the government defines as “meaningful use” so that you don’t end up lost at sea with empty pockets.

* Redundancy is a system design that duplicates components to provide alternatives in case one component fails

That is unless you don’t trust that your billing provider is collecting as best as they can. If that is the case then I feel that you already have an issue that needs to be addressed.

It has always blown me away that having your medical billing company’s collection agency be the primary collector of your bad debt may be a conflict of interest.

The relationship between physician and medical billing provider is one made on trust. You are entrusting them to handle your patient information, to correctly file your claims, collect your money, and distribute your revenues. If the bond is not strong enough to hold the belief that your billing agents are effectively collecting in a timely and effective fashion, it shouldn’t be a question of whether you should use their collection agency, but whether you should be using them at all.

You should Profit Using Your Medical Billing Company’s Collection Agency

Using a collection company that is a sister company, or part of the same billing company that you currently use will increase your collection rate. Why? Because the company will have better communication with the billing provider and better availability of information.

You may not believe me, but think about the last time you tried to get access to another company’s data. Was it easy? Probably not. If you were connecting to a computer system you had to get forms filled out, approved, and then you had to have IT set up the account and you had to be trained on how to use the system. Even in a best case scenario you are looking at day or two before you can even think about accessing any data.

If you are simply requesting information over the phone or via fax, an outside collector doesn’t know your billing agencies employees or who is in charge of what data. They don’t know the company terminology. E.G. What is the difference between a claim and an invoice. To them that question may mean nothing, but to the billing agency it could be the difference between two major reports.

Reducing the amount of red tape that needs to be met in order to collect data and increase the speed of AR is your ultimate goal because it increases the likelihood of you being reimbursed for your services. So in my opinion not using your billing company’s collection agency is a conflict of interest.

- Adam M.

P.S. This post comes before our next service post that will be introducing our sister company Custom Collections Services, Inc. Many of our clients use our service coupled with another company and we have found time and again that when exceptions in the collection process have occurred they have been able to handle them quickly and responsively because of the ease of communication.