3 Ways You Can Minimize Medical Billing And Coding Errors In Your Urgent Care Center

Managing medical billing and coding can be quite a challenge for urgent care centers, especially with the limited resources and time constraints they face. But insurance billing makes up a major part of the total revenue of an urgent care center and so needs to be taken seriously.

The biggest challenge in medical billing and coding is the increase in errors. If not addressed and identified immediately, they can have negative effects on the revenue stream of the center.

This challenge causes many urgent care centers to seek services from an urgent care billing company. These companies work as experienced medical billing and coding partners with the urgent care centers. They not only help the centers to minimize medical billing errors but also provide high quality billing and coding services.

So what are the ways of minimizing medical billing errors? We’ve listed three ways by which you can reduce your medical billing and coding errors and increase the revenue of your urgent care center.

1. Avoid Upcoding Or Undercoding

Both upcoding and undercoding are illegal practices that can lead to fines or even criminal prosecution. Though urgent care centers do not on purpose create such errors, there are quite many small and medium medical centers that resort to such unlawful practices. They deliberately undercode or upcode medical procedures for their financial gains.

Upcoding happens when urgent care centers use CPT codes to bill a patient for services that they did not avail. This is a compliance issue that should be looked into seriously to avoid any legal action from being taken against the urgent care center.

Undercoding occurs when some codes are not added to a patient’s bill. This can happen by mistake, but there are medical centers that undercode to avoid an audit.

So whether an urgent care center is upcoding and undercoding accidentally or deliberately, both actions affect their total revenue and can also attract legal action in the long run. When the codes of your urgent care center do not match with those entered by the surgeon’s office, the mismatch can result in a denial. Claim denials can put your urgent care center at great risk.

2.  Avoid Duplicate Billing

Billing medical services more than once can happen by mistake by a coder but it happens more often when multiple people are responsible for inputting billing information. This makes verifying each patient’s billing information an unavoidable task.

Every entry should be double-checked for errors and missed information. Sometimes coders mistakenly enter codes with either too many digits or add too few.

To avoid future complications, urgent care centers should restrict too many people from entering patient information and codes. Also, it helps to be thorough in verifying every patient’s personal and billing details.

3. Avoid Insurance Errors

Usually staff members at urgent care centers assume that insurance information and details of patients who visit regularly have remained unchanged. This assumption can lead to several insurance-related issues, such as medical services not being authorized or coverage being terminated.

To avoid such situations and from claims being denied, ensure your staff verifies the insurance-related information of every patient who walks into the center at every visit. Not a single visit should be missed.

The inclusion of this step of verification in your billing workflow will not only ensure not a single claim is denied but will also have a positive effect on your revenue stream.

Gables Medical Billing Can Help Improve Your Billing And Coding Accuracy

Maintaining accuracy in medical billing and coding is of utmost importance, but human errors do occur. Some common errors that most coders make, include:

• Inputting ICD-10-CM codes incorrectly
• Using wrong CPT codes
• Submitting incorrect patient/provider information
• Missing entering codes on a claim

If your urgent care center is finding it difficult to manage its medical billing work, we can help. At Gables Medical Billing, an urgent care billing company in Orlando, we are South Florida’s billing specialists. Contact us at 786-725-2120 with your medical billing queries and requirements.