Medical Coding Mistakes That Are Killing Your Patient Care And Practice
How’d you like to throw a big, fat, hairy grenade on your medical billing process? I mean toss that thing right in the middle of your practice and watch it propel tiny shards of CPT codes and stacks of paper all over your freshly waxed lobby floor. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
As enticing as those sound- especially on the days when you’ve run out of your favorite creamer- it’s probably not going to stop medical coding errors from being a thing. In fact, dare I say it might make it worse.
But that is what’s happening the longer you decide not to get help with your medical billing. Thinking it’s cheaper to keep that monster in house makes about as much sense as sticking a Q-Tip into a light socket and expecting to get cotton candy. A Medical Service Organization (MSO) like Neolytix can help reduce the number of errors in your coding process while keeping the quality of your patient care high.
Let’s take a look at some of these medical coding mistakes and their consequences.
Medical Coding Mistakes Mess With Patient Care
Medical coding is what puts the bread and butter on the table. Without it, you don’t get paid what you’ve earned. Repeat after me: it’s all about the billable revenue. Say it with me- The services you provide are translated into billable revenuuuue. So, keeping up with your medical billing is what determines how much green paper you get paid.
When you make mistakes with your medical coding you run the risk of putting the kibosh on that money tree growing in your backyard. In fact, sometimes it may not grow at all. Meaning, mistakes can result in delaying your revenue or preventing yourself from getting reimbursed all together. That means no paying your bills and no paying your staff, and no trips to the Caribbean.
It’s important to note that on average the majority of claims are rejected or denied. How do you feel about donating $25,000 of a miscoded procedure’s reimbursement to your friendly neighborhood insurance company? That’s money you earned that would be lost due to a failure to correctly follow proper procedure and fill in every single mind-numbing box on the forms.
Don’t get me started on how crazy expensive delayed reimbursements can be. They will suck the life right out of your practice. And if you have enough of them, they’ll cause the paperwork to backup and your staff to want to strangle each other. Included with that chaos, are coding errors that could go overlooked. It’s very easy to do. In fact, it’s one of the most common mistakes office staff make.
If you don’t have a system that consistently works, with safe checks along the way, then it’s all too easy for money to slip right through the cracks. And then you’ll never get your fingers on that revenue that you’re entitled to receive. If you think that’s bad the get this—you may never even know it’s gone missing.
This cycle of generating revenue and then claiming your reimbursement is very sticky and requires an extreme attention to detail. That’s why you shouldn’t leave it in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what he or she is doing. You need an expert that deals with this to the degree that they can spot and anticipate mistakes that may get left behind.
Medical Coding Mistakes Mess With Your Reputation
It’s not bad enough that coding mistakes can steal money from your pocket, and earn you a reputation for poor patient care, but it can also ruin your reputation as a credible practitioner in the industry. If there are too many mistakes when coding, you may be at the risk of paying fines or federal penalties for fraud.
The entity that dictates and defines the parameters for identifying fraudulent claims is called the False Claims Act, or FCA. That’s what they use to come after you if they suspect that you could be filing fraudulent claims. Coding mistakes look very similar to intentional fraud claims. If it looks like you have too many coding mistakes, the consequences could result in you paying a fine or needing to hire an attorney.
If you are accused of fraud, trying to get yourself out of that would require that you would need to prove you were unintentional about making these coding mistakes. Who wants to be in that situation in the first place? This is why you should be on the offense when it comes to monitoring the coding process to make sure you are as correct as you possibly can the first time.
Avoiding Coding Mistakes And The Consequences Of Inaccurate Reporting
Medical coding is a very prickly bear, one that you don’t want to wrestle with by yourself. When practices are thinking about outsourcing their medical coding to a medical services organization, such as Neolytix, they’re assured that fewer mistakes are made and better care is provided for their patients as a result. Your billing cycles are going to run much better, because you have a focused expert scrutinizing every entry making sure that everything is filled out and completed correctly.
And it’s not just medical billing that Neolytix offers, we can also help with many other administrative medical office needs that compliment your medical billing demands. If this is something that you believe you could benefit from, we’re happy to speak with you. Just fill out the information on this form.
