By Dr. Brian Capra
In my experience managing billing operations for over 300 practices across the country seeing between 100 and 1500 patient visits per week, I have had the opportunity to see the best of the best chiropractic practice management systems.
The more I see the more I realize they are all built in the same way, however different they seemed on the surface. They all had the some or all of the following components.
- Scheduler
- Notifications
- SOAP Notes
- Custom
- X-rays
- Paperless
- Electronic Billing Component
- Care Plan Management
While every good chiropractic practice management system should have all of these components, the above mentioned features are relatively easy to build. There are some much more complex issues that face today’s chiropractic office. If the doctor does not have a system, technology and people in place to handle them effectively it could cost him not only tens or thousands of dollars but possibly criminal investigation and jail time.
These Issues are:
- Maximized Insurance Collections
- 100% Transparency into the billing process (weather in house billing or with an outsourced billing company)
- Audit Warning System (Post Payment Insurance Audit)
- Compliant SOAP Notes and documentation
- Practice automation in order to decrease staff overhead
Today Insurance billing and collections is simply becoming infinitely more difficult with each passing year. Insurance companies are not only making things more complicated with copays, deductibles, coinsurance, allowables, medical necessity, etc. but they are also changing the rules as they go. They change diagnosis code hierarchy without warning. To top it off the changes are not the same state to state or in some cases region to region. They randomly change the allowable rate. Without technology in place to tell you when any one of these things occur any biller can and will be easily overwhelmed as changes occur faster than they can stay on top of them. The bottom line is decreased overall collections and an accounts receivable that spirals out of control.
