You want to give your patients the best care ever, right? But, the truth is that you must prioritize your nursing home billing services as well and any mistake in your billing practice can significantly reduce the overall profitability of your practice. Always remember one thing handling nursing home billing services is not as easy an affair as you need to deal with various regulations set by different insurance companies, the huge number of complex codes and modifiers and many other guidelines set by each state in the US. Nowadays, the majority of mid and small-sized nursing homes opt to outsource their revenue cycle management to professional nursing home billing companies.   These experts know how to avoid mistakes, make sure claims are sent quickly, and help your practice run better. With their help, you can keep your practice financially healthy and make your patients happier! 

Fortunately, with your in-house administrative staff members, you can also streamline a perfect home health billing service by avoiding the major mistakes mentioned below- 

4 Common mistakes in nursing home billing services:

Not performing insurance eligibility verification:  

One big reason insurance companies say "no" to claims is because they don’t have the right patient information. That can mean a mistake in how you spell the patient’s name, the wrong birthday, or even a mix-up in their policy number. To stop this from happening, it’s super important to double-check all the patient info before you send a claim. Lots of clinics get help from professional insurance verification services to make sure everything is correct before they start helping the patient! 

Missing prior authorization: 

Some medicines, tests, procedures, or medical equipment need something called prior authorization, which is like asking for permission first! You have to finish this approval process before you can start treating someone. If you don’t get the okay from the insurance company first, they might say no to the claim later, and that’s not good! 

Coding mistakes:  

Medical coding mistakes can happen when you use the wrong codes for a diagnosis or a procedure. Sometimes, people accidentally charge for a fancier service than what was really done—this is called upcoding! Other times, they might break up services that should be billed together, which is called unbundling. It’s also common to mess up by mixing up diagnosis and treatment codes. Plus, codes can change, so if you use old ones, you might not charge enough or you might charge too much! 

Duplicate billing:  

This happens when you send in more than one bill for the same procedure. Sometimes, billing teams might send the bill again before the insurance company has had a chance to check the first one. If you try to bill for the same thing you did on the same day, the insurance might think it’s a duplicate claim and say no. Even if you didn’t mean to, insurance companies can see duplicate billing as something sneaky! 

Taking care of your nursing home billing services is super important! If you make mistakes, it can hurt how much money your practice makes. Fortunately, you can avoid all the potential errors in your billing mechanism and keep things running smoothly by outsourcing your end-to-end revenue cycle management to a third-party billing company. Keep one thing in mind that with professional help you can always ensure the healthy financial state of your practice.