Importance of Documentation for Accurate Billing

Posted by mgsionline on February 18th, 2013

The Healthcare domain is a tricky field in which profits and losses are unpredictable. If a physician or a healthcare facility looks forward to either increase profits or to reduce losses by enhancing their revenue cycle management, then accurate billing is essential. Proper documentation plays a vital role in determining the accuracy of medical claims billing. Earlier, traditional paper charts were used for documenting patient information and diagnoses. However, the revolutionary EHR (Electronic Health Record) software has replaced this practice in the past decade.Whether a healthcare facility uses the traditional or the modern documentation method, proper documentation decides the accuracy of medical claims billing. Many healthcare facilities and individual physician groups face two crucial problems in their healthcare billing services, which are illustrated in detail below,

Improper Documentation: Documentation of patient demographics using the traditional method and then carrying out physician billing services will be time consuming and inaccurate sometimes. The erroneous information goes unnoticed and reaches the insurance payer for claims processing. Consequently, multiple claims get rejected affecting the revenue of the healthcare facilities badly.

Incomplete Documentation: Sometimes, a physician might fail to document certain important patient diagnostic information due to work pressure and busy schedule. In such cases, the claims either get denied completely or get underpaid by the insurance companies. This situation is not only likely in traditional documentation method but also in the EHR software. Simple mistakes and oversight can lead to multiple denials. Therefore, proper documentation is highly essential to promote accurate medical claims billing.

As discussed earlier, choosing the type of documentation doesn’t matter, however the effort put in to document patient and encounter data accurately matters a lot. To do that, a healthcare facility or a physician must outsource their healthcare billing services to a well reputed medical billing company like MGSI that not only provides high-end EMR software, but also exceptional physician billing services to its clients.

About MGSI:

Instead of just being a vendor, a billing service should escalate such documenting errors to the practice so that such errors can be avoided in the future improving the billing accuracy.  MGSI, a company with 20 years of service based in Tampa, Florida, is one such company that renders high-quality medical billing services to its clients throughout the United States.