Medical Coding Companies: Why to Hire a Certified Team

Wondering why you need to hire Medical coding companies? Is it important to opt for outsourcing services? Well, a medical coding company can make things easier for you by preventing the risk of errors. With their help, you can increase revenue, achieve a higher customer satisfaction rate, and provide the best healthcare services to your patients.

Read further to learn why companies are providing medical coding services, why hiring medical coders is important, and signs that you need to outsource the services.

What is Medical Coding?

Medical coding process transforms healthcare procedures, diagnoses, equipment, and medical services into universal alphanumeric codes. The procedure and diagnosis codes come from the medical records documentation, such as transcription of radiological and laboratory results, physician’s notes, etc.

Medical coding experts ensure that codes are used appropriately during the medical billing procedure, which includes assigning the right codes, abstracting the data from clinical documentation, and creating appropriate claims.

Medical coding occurs every time you treat a patient. You review patients’ complaints and medical history, assess how to treat and what’s wrong with patients, and create documentation for your patients’ visits. Medical codes translate this data into standardized codes that shows the following thing to payers:

·         Services, treatments, and supplies offered to the patient

·         Patient’s diagnosis

·         Medical necessities for services, treatments, or supplies patients get

·         Any health issue or unusual circumstances that affects those services and treatments

Why You Need Help of Medical Coding Services?

The medical facility revenue stream is based on documenting what was decided, learned, and performed. A patient’s test results, diagnosis, and treatment need to be documented, not only for the reimbursement process but to guarantee excellent treatment and care in future visits.

A patient’s medical history and personal health information guide them through subsequent treatments and complaints, so they need to be easy to understand. This is more important for the bigger facilities that experience many patient visits every year.

The challenge for medical practices is that there are thousands of diseases, injuries, conditions, and causes of death. Also, several services are performed by a facility, and many injectable drugs and supplies need to be tracked. There’s too much going on at one time to be manually tracked by the facility.

With medical coding solutions, health experts classify them for easier tracking and reporting. Note that each procedure, tool, and disease have different acronyms, descriptions, eponyms, and names. Medical coding standardizes the presentation and language of every service, disease, tool, and other aspect of the healthcare industry so that medical billers can easily understand, track, modify, and claim insurance.

This standardized language is designed by the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which allows payers, providers, and hospitals to communicate with each other consistently and easily. Since medical coding needs to be done in a particular way, doctors and other healthcare providers require expert help who have knowledge and training in medical coding. They know the right codes for each drug, service, equipment, tool, and other things that reduce the risk of making mistakes.

Note that appropriate medical coding is important for accurate medical billing. Healthcare companies aren’t reimbursed if they use the wrong medical codes in the claim. So, hiring a qualified and experienced team that improves your chances of getting approval for insurance claims is best.

Reasons to Hire Medical Coders

Up-to-Date Certifications

Experts need to stay updated with the updated coding regulations, systems, and best practices. They also should have certifications and complete the education required to become medical coders. Medical coders must keep up with updates from healthcare organizations, government agencies, and other organizations through their blogs, websites, webinars, seminars, email lists, and other resources.

Staying current with the certifications and other things requires a great investment of time. Sometimes a major update occurs in the medical industry that changes medical coding. For instance, the introduction of ICD 10 came with several different codes.

If you hire Medical Coding Companies, you don’t need to worry about changes in medical coding and other requirements. These companies will take care of all the medical billing and coding issues. Health experts can rest assured that the professionals working on your data are up to date with their skills, certifications, and knowledge. At Portiva, our expert team follows coding regulations and meets all the requirements before they offer you reliable medical coding services.

Improvement in Collection Rate

The collection of patient information has a great impact on the financial health of the health facility. However, one of the bigger challenges in the healthcare industry is the slow pace of collection. Data filing and tracking hundreds of patients can become challenging if any health facility is short-staffed.

Hiring a professional medical coder can enhance the collection rate and reduce the number of denied claims. Timely filing and precision in the claims documentation result in speedy clearance of insurance claims. Medical coders with relevant experience and knowledge in your domain can effectively increase the collection rate with error-free filing. They help you speed up the payment collection process.

Compliance with the Industrial Upgrades

It might be possible that your health practice might not be generating as much revenue as you invest. This may be happening because of the following reasons:

·          Outdated medical services revenue cycle management

·          Incorrect coding processes

·         Non-compliance with HIPAA regulations

Note that accurate documentations are important to reimburse your claims. Medical coders require knowledge of updated regulatory standards to file and submit claims properly. They ensure HIPAA compliance throughout their practice while dealing with ePHI or PHI.

A credible and qualified medical billing company can help you to stay on top of the medical industry trends. They are responsible for using an accurate set of codes; they use all the necessary methods and technologies to offer better results.

Hiring Challenges

If you plan to establish an in-house medical coder team, it might cause several problems for you. Finding qualified, experienced, and skilled medical coders in the market is hard. Even if you find one, it may cost you exponential money.   Finding an experienced coder in a specific field is even more difficult.

There might not be enough credible medical coders in your area who meet your requirements. The shortage of medical coders in some places also drives up the salaries of medical coders. Furthermore, retaining your hired coders is also a great challenge, especially when there are great job opportunities for coders.

When a medical facility outsources its services and opts for a medical billing service provider, several coders are in the market to assist you. However, not everyone is reliable. Medical coding companies have teams that include members with different specialties to help you with every billing and coding task. People working on remote medical coding jobs are highly qualified, which helps them reduce the risk of errors and mistakes.

Signs that You Need Experts Working on Medical Coding Jobs

You Have Too Many Denied Claims

You may need to outsource your billing services if you have many denied claims. Denied claims indicate that you and your team have insufficient knowledge to code and claim. This will affect the health facility’s financial health and put the facility at the right of fines and penalties for errors. Medical coders will help you code appropriately and claim on your behalf to prevent fines.

Your Medical Billing Team Is Not Properly Trained

Training your medical billing team can be a challenge. However, keeping up with the updated laws and regulations of coding and billing is important. Your staff must stay updated with the health industry trends to handle appeals and denials.

 If not, you will lose money on each claim. Medical billing also requires skills. In the case of medical coding companies, they ensure to keep their staff up to date and provide you efficient results.

You and Your Team are Burned Out

Providing treatment to patients leaves little time to manage the paperwork that needs to be completed daily. On average, a doctor’s clinic has hundreds every day. Even if you have a few doctors on board, it can be challenging for your in-house billing team to manage the documentation, and they might be overwhelmed with the workload.

As a result, you might face missed deadlines and significant errors. Hiring medical billing companies can ensure your bills get submitted on time without getting you stressed. Your team can focus on providing good patient care while the billing company will handle all the coding and billing tasks.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, medical coding companies help health care providers to accurately claim bills. This helps medical practices to get payments quickly and reduces stress and workload from doctors and other health experts.

If you want to hire experienced and certified medical coders you can contact Portiva. We offer medical billing services to support medical facilities. With our help, you can improve your patient satisfaction rate and increase your revenue. Our team will also guide you throughout the process to keep you updated.