Medical Billing Blogs

Collecting from patients has become a growing challenge for ASCs in recent years. A growth replicated the continued rise in patient financial responsibility, even after insurance. As patients’ financial responsibility for healthcare costs has shifted, ambulatory surgery centres must commit more attention and resources to collect these higher amounts. In fact, they are making every effort to do so while keeping in mind the stress and struggle that some patients face in covering personal expenses. Regardless of the growing challenges that ambulatory surgery centres collections and their patients face, ASCs must make sure that they have practices in place to assist them in collecting what patients owe for their treatment. Let’s have a deep dive into strategies that can be followed to maximize the collections for your Ambulatory Surgery Centres (ASCs): Devise a defined collections policy It’s critical for ambulatory surgery centres to have a clear col...

  Making a choice between in-house and outsourced revenue cycle management (RCM) has been a long topic of discussion. As an Ambulatory Surgery Center leader, you would have probably realized that the billing process is the lifeblood of your center. When it's working properly, everything seems to fall into place. Otherwise, you would have either witnessed or dealt with issues involving partial or non-collected payment, delayed payment, or finding (and retaining) capable local talent. This perplexing question has no one-size-fits-all solution. While both approaches have proven to be successful for many healthcare centers, your decision should be based solely on the age and size of your center, the costs associated with running the practice, volume metrics, and what your center requires. Are you still perplexed? Let's have a look at both the approaches: In-house ASC Medical Billing Pros ●         Flexibility You are in a better position t...

  In the last few years, Ambulatory Surgical Centres (ASC) has become one of the fastest-growing medical services. However, the ASC billing and coding is different from the physician, surgeon, or hospital billing. Hence, the billing department of an ASC facility has to be aware of the various guidelines that Medicare often uses compared to the other payers. Furthermore, different payers differ regarding the approved procedures, medical necessity, and other requirements for filling out the forms for reimbursement. The lack of awareness of all these and the regular updates published by CMS every quarter on the lists of surgical procedures covered, the ancillary services covered for establishing payment indicators, and payment rates can be challenging for ASC billing. Added to this, the newly created Category III CPT codes and Level II HCPCS make the billing and coding process difficult, resulting in some common billing errors. For any ASC practice, it is essential to know these ...