If you work in a medical care environment, what is your goal when you go to work everyday? Did you enter your behavioral health career because you wanted to create positive interactions with patients and help them progress in their own personal goals? Do you just want to say at the end of the day that you made a difference in someone’s life? While all of these lofty goals are great aspirations, the fact of the matter is that sometimes the paperwork involved in dealing with patients often gets in the way of the real patient care that you long for.
Whether you are a receptionist at the front desk of a medical office that serves some of the youngest children with the biggest problems, or you are a nurse providing hands on care to the elderly, often the day to day tasks of billing and insurance fillings can take you away from providing the medical care you desire.
Switching your office to behavioral health billing software and other types of therapist billing software services can get you out from behind the desk and next to the patients who need and want your personal attention.
In the year 2011, 81% of healthcare providers said it took more than one month to collect from a patient after claim adjudication. This number increased to 83% in 2012. With all of the additional healthcare laws and guidelines that are now in place, in office billing processes are often very ineffective. Robbing patient contact time from dedicated caregivers and stranding patients in lobbies and rooms while they wait for their medical professional to finish entering an endless amount of data.
Making the decision to contract out your billing services, or making use of time saving behavioral health billing software and other packages, can give precious chunks of time back to your best doctors, nurses and other healthcare personnel. Since 70% of providers in 2012 said they received some of their payer payments electronically, doesn’t it make sense to automate as much of the billing and insurance submission process as possible?
The bottom line is, in the case of complicated insurance filings even the best behavioral health billing software can be time consuming if your key office staff members do not process a large amount of claims. In fact, statistics from 2012 indicate that eliminating the paperwork, errors, and staff requirements of traditional, paper claim submissions can save as much as $9,000 per physician, according to data cited by the American Medical Association (AMA).Often, contracting these tedious billing and claims tasks out to a service can save your healthcare office both time and money. Time that you can instead spend with patients and money that you can instead use to provide even more thorough patient care.