How to Increase Collections for Your Chiropractic Practice
Increase Collections with Your Provider Workbench Increase Collections from insurance companies by watching this 35 minute webinar. Learn how to increase your insurance collections by getting every claim paid in full and on-time. Your provider workbench lists every claim that needs your attention and once you provide the missing information, they get re-submitted and get paid. It’s much easier than trying to determine what needs to be done from a list of claims in a report. Watch the webinar immediately right on this page by filling out your name and email address. We know it’s a lot to ask for your email address and we promise not to ever sell it to another company. Read the transcript: Jason: So, we’ll get started here in just a minute. During the holiday season, Jess, just to kinda kick off this conversation. I probably had more conversations with our providers, our actual customers than I had maybe the previous three or four months because we’re covering so much. And patient volumes were down, so you had time to actually look at collections. And I think most were just saying, “Oh, we’re doing fairly well. I’d just like to see if we can do better.” But then there was one provider who had a conversation with some other of his trusted peers. And they’re an in-house provider in Texas, and by in-house just for anyone listening in, I simply mean that our billing team isn’t doing the follow-up and the posting. They’re doing that in their own office and frankly they know what they’re doing. They’re not an office that needs a lot of direction. They got some top notch people. And they were asking me, you know, about the workbench and I said, “Well, you’ve got an issue with yours and I’ll tie this into our topic here in just a second.” Their office has been so used to following up on claims a certain way that they would print lists of claims, put them on their Excel spreadsheets and then organize them how they’re used to for years and years and years. And they’ve got 20 years of experience so they knew what they were doing. And so the results were okay. They weren’t spectacular but they were okay. And because I said to him, “Listen, I’m really worried about your collections right now because I see that your workbench claims are so high.” And he said, well, for anonymity’s sake, I’ll just call her Jessica. Jessica, you know, was on the call and said, “Oh, I just don’t do it that way.” And so today, we’re gonna talk about what way people use our system to follow-up on claims and what best practices are. Because Jessica is an expert. She’s a billing expert. She knows more than I’ll ever know about medical billing. She cared about the practice, she was engaged. Jessica was doing the right thing, it’s just that nobody knew about it. And so I wanted to help Jessica accomplish her goals but also give the practice on her some piece of mind as to how to check up on Jessica should something go wrong. Because Jessica could win the lottery, Jessica might have to quit and move somewhere else, you know, there are lots of things that can happen. And so today, we’re gonna change our focus to not necessarily billing perforJasonce, per se, but the thing that helps you achieve billing perforJasonce and that is the tool in our system that helps identify claims that need an action. That action can vary and we’re gonna talk about what type of actions, you know, can be done. But more importantly, what the methodology is to choose and identify those claims that need follow up. And so that’s how we’re gonna spend this first 15 to 20 minutes of today’s time together. And then after that, we’re gonna open it up to any questions that anybody has regarding this topic or any other topic. So to do that, we’re actually gonna jump right into this topic and talk about measuring. We’ve done that here before and we’re gonna start off the same way. I’m gonna blow this up, Jess, to make it really easy for our viewers/listeners, webinar participants to see this. And I’m gonna start by focusing really largely on our dashboard. We’ve gone over this before but we’re gonna focus on a few numbers. Our 32,000 is our total outstanding accounts receivable. Those are the insurance charges that have either just been submitted or I don’t care if they were submitted ten years ago. If they still have a balance on them they’re gonna show show up here. Then we break those numbers down into buckets, 26,000, 4,600, and zero. I’ve talked about this on this program before but we like to measure how long it takes for a practice to get paid. If that practice is getting paid in 30 days, everything is great. If that practice is getting paid in 30 days, everything is great. That practice is not getting paid in 30 days and we have our 120-day bucket, meaning those charges, you know, our date of service from over 120 days ago, we get worried. Not just a little worried, we know that the likelihood of collecting on those claims goes way, way down. So today, we’re gonna talk about how to address the total outstanding backlogs that comprises an accounts receivable of 32,419. When I was on the phone with our hypothetical, Jessica, who is a real person in Texas, I asked her the question. I wish you could have been on this phone call, it was great because her answer made a lot of sense and I’d like to move our discussion and look at those particular claims. I asked her, “Well, how do you know which claims are gonna follow up on?” She goes, “I always work the hardest ones first.” That’s surprising, right? I can see the
Increase Collections In Your Chiropractic Office
Use Payor Allowed Amounts to Increase Collections Increase collections from insurance companies by viewing this free 30 minute webinar. See how to use Payor Allowed Amounts to check if you have been paid on-time and in full for your services by the insurance companies. This built-in feature of our Genesis Chiropractic Software shows what you’re supposed to be paid for various CPT codes that you bill out. Use this to actually see what you were paid and then you can see if it’s an underpayment or not. Insurance companies are known to underpay by “mistake” as they try to keep money that should be paid to your Chiropractic practice. If an underpayment is detected then the claim can be sent to your billing team for follow-up with that insurance company. Let them get to the bottom of it for you. Watch the webinar immediately right on this page. Read the transcript: Jason: Welcome to those who are just joining, we are going to start in just a moment here. Waiting just for a few more people to jump from the web section to the audio section and then we’ll get today’s webinar started. Thanks for joining us. You’ll notice that you’re all muted and we ask that you check your questions in so that we can answer them as the webinar goes on. We’re going to start, we’re going to spend about 10 to 15 minutes on our topic today which is Collections, very specific to Collections, the Payer Allowed feature in our system, and we’ll talk about why it’s important and then we’ll open this up to any type of question that you might have after that. So, I’m looking forward and we’ll give you…actually it’s 2:05 now, Jessica. Let’s get started. So, my name is Jason Barnes, chief operations officer here and this is starting to sound like a broken record, isn’t it? Jessica: A little bit. Jason: As always. Jessica Pancost [SP], the head of our training and help desk team here at our organization, is co-hosting. So, today we are talking about a topic near and dear to pretty much every practice owner that we have and then a whole bunch of staff who are directly impacted by collections. And so, today we’re talking about collections, so we’re going to spend a little bit of the time talking, not necessarily about why collections are important, I think that one’s self-explanatory unless you want to spend some time on that Jess? Jessica: No. Jason: You’re good? but we want to talk about how to measure collections. Want to talk about how to break it down in two separate areas where a practice owner can make sure A, all their visits are getting paid, and B, all the visits are getting paid the right amount. Today, we’re going to primarily focus on the second of the two problems we discussed. The first problem of making sure all visits are getting paid, it’s not necessarily a simple problem to solve. However, we will spend just a moment in a broad stroke on how we approach that, and it has to do with our dashboard. You can see here that I’ve blown up one of the most important parts of our home screen and it’s the dashboard, here of course, in our dummy practice where we’re going to look at collections month to date, total outstanding accounts receivable, meaning all of the charges that need to be followed up on from an insurance perspective, and then we break down those accounts receivable into three separate buckets. The accounts receivable will be on 30 days, beyond 60 days and beyond 120 days. So, in this particular case, there are $32,419 total outstanding accounts receivable, $26,000, $6,000 and then zero dollars beyond 120 Days. We break this into percentages so that folks can measure, not only compared to themselves, but to the industry, how well they’re doing at making sure all visits are getting paid. Good question, Jess. “How do I know if my accounts receivable is really low and all our visits are getting paid?” It basically translates into if you have a visit that’s not paid, that’s sitting out there past 120 days, the likelihood of collecting on it, I don’t care if it’s from a patient or an insurance company, goes down significantly. Your goal as a practice owner should be to monitor this number. This zero dollars is unheard of, but it happens, and we can start talking about ways that it happens in this webinar series, but this is a great indication that you’re getting all of your visits paid. If your accounts receivable over 120 days is very, very low, one, two percent, it means that you’re getting 98%, 99% of your visits paid. And the rest of them are either getting written off, appropriately we hope, but there’s ways of tracking that as well or they’re being moved into a paid status which is the ultimate goal. So, if you know that your visits are getting paid, and again that’s not where we’re going to be spending the bulk of our time today, the other one is, “Are your visits getting paid the right amount?” And I ask a bunch of interrogative questions today want to go over the answers to them. What is the right amount? Jess, how does, you’re talking to somebody about collections, do you have any idea, you know, to tell them if they’re getting paid the right amount for their CPT codes? Jessica: No. Jason: Why not? Jessica: I don’t know [inaudible 00:04:37], but different contracts and different states and everyone gets paid… Jason: Its complicated, it’s a complicated answer and the first thing we want to let all of our providers know is if it doesn’t seem simple for you, that’s correct, you’re not in a simple industry. What I need to establish before we start looking into this is it’s meant to be confusing, it’s meant to not
Patient Retention Automation for Chiropractors
Patient Retention Automation View this free 30 minute webinar to see how to automate retaining your patients. To retain patients you need to educate, sell, communicate, track, measure, follow-up and solicit referrals. Our chiropractic software incorporates built-in patient education and patient communication via email, text and phone calls that can be automated to fit your needs. Our software also allows you to track your metrics, measure them and follow-up too. If you can use all of these features, or at least several of them, then retaining your patients will increase.
Chiropractic Patient Retention Tips
Retain your Patience and your Patients! Patient Retention: View this free 30 minute webinar to see how to retain your patients and keep your patience. For patient retention you need to educate, sell, communicate, track, measure, follow-up and solicit referrals. Genesis Chiropractic Software incorporates built-in patient education and patient communication via email, text and phone calls that can be automated to fit your needs. Our software also allows you to track your metrics, measure them and follow-up too. If you can use all of these features, or at least several of them, then your patient retention will increase. Read the transcript: Jason: Welcome everybody. Let’s get started. It’s always good to be here every week. I love the feedback we get after the webinars. Even some of the constructive criticism that we’ve gotten last couple of weeks has led to some great internal discussions and even some good client-facing discussions about how we can make certain aspects of our interface better. So I would like to open today with soliciting anybody who does see this, let us know. There’s something you like, we’d love to hear that. But more importantly, if there’s something we can make better, we would love to hear that as well. One more introduction, I’ve got Jessica Pancoast through the head of our help desk and our training team here. My name’s Jason Barnes. I’m the chief operating officer. And today our subject matter is near and dear to my heart because it’s the one thing every provider tells us that their primary focus is, and that is retaining patients. So, we wanna make sure we talk about retaining patients in two different ways: reports, and the actual work of retaining patients. Whenever somebody new comes on board, they often ask me, “Jas, what reports do you have?” It’s always a question that somebody asks us. I mean, you’ve been in a lot of those conversations as well and you’re smirking and smiling for those people who are just listening. Why are you smirking and smiling? Jessica: Because if you go to our report list, you’ll see we have a lot of reports. Jason: And the reason behind having a lot of reports is a lot of them are very useful. And for years, that’s how people managed their practice, they managed reports. And I can’t stress to you enough how valuable reports can be when you’re diagnosing a problem. You can’t do it. I’m on the phone with a provider today talking about low collections and we had all the right reports to get there and refute some of the claims for low collections, you know, for Blue Cross Blue Shield, and acknowledge some of them as being totally valid for their personal injuries. The reports were the only tool that allow us to actually diagnose whether or not these collections were low. But with patient retention, that’s a different ballgame. We’ve got reports. We got a No Show Report. We’ve got a report for your patients who leave your office without future appointments. Those are the two biggies. You have other reports that you could look at and talk about compliance. Say, “Hey, I’ve got a 60-visit care plan. You know, how many visits out of that care plan were missed or made?” You know, those are other ways of looking at it and there are even different reports which we could focus on. You know, how many new patients show up for the third visit? There’s a big one we get. You know, they come for their evaluation, they came for the report or findings, but they didn’t make it to the actual treatment portion. It happens. You get them talking about what the cost is, what the investment is going to be for patients, and that can really change things. Without those numbers, without those statistics, I know practices are basically paralyzed with what part of their process to actually fix. I definitely love reports. And there are some aspects of reports that I loathe, I hate. Because they look at a process that might be broken. And I’ll just talk about no shows because it’s going to be one of the focuses of today’s presentation. No shows are a big problem for practices. We see practices with up to 50, even 60% no show rates and those are caused by one of two things. One, do they have a scheduling policy that’s really loose? “Hey, we’re going to put you down on an appointment for next week. You know, show up, don’t show up, just call us. Let us know.” We have lots of practices to do that. Do I want to tell that doctor how to practice? To everyone listening to this, no. I have no intention. And Jess, let me check with you, you want to tell that doctor how to practice? Jessica: No. Not at all. Jason: No. Not our intention whatsoever. But we can’t measure how well that practice is doing at retaining those patients if we don’t have some sort of standard that we can rely on in the practice as far as scheduling. And the other reason is, and the more dreaded one is, they just didn’t show up. Why didn’t they show up? Oh, the spectrum of reasons is too big to actually speak out but there are only two reasons. They physically couldn’t, because of a legitimate excuse or they’re just not coming back. Which is which? I don’t think any provider I’ve ever spoken to actually cares. The action needed in that situation is for that patient to be contacted and confirmation that the patient’s coming back to be garnered by a staff member or the doctor themselves. That’s the desired result of any time a patient no shows. When a patient leaves your office without a future appointment, our statistics show that that patient is twice as likely as the patient who leaves the office with an appointment, literally, twice