Background
A trusted EHR and Practice Management solution provider, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, is part of a globally-trusted company with nearly $11B in revenues and approximately 620,000 clients, including more than 45,000 U.S.-based physicians. The company processes nearly three million claims each month for more than 13,500 providers in 5,000-plus practices. It offers a cloud-based electronic health record, practice management, medical scheduling software and medical billing services for mainly smaller medical practices.
Medical billing services include a full range of revenue cycle management, including claims review, claims scrubbing, claim submission and tracking, carrier follow-up, denials and appeals, refilling and secondary filing, payment posting, patient statements, patient payment plans, patient call center, patient payment postings and the free patient portal.
Indexing is the first step in the process, differentiating among bills, insurance cards and other information. But the process can be labor-intensive, especially when documents are illegible or someone’s handwriting can’t be read. Those cases lead to follow-up procedures that can slow overall response times.
Faster response processing
‘The new process not only saves time in fax creation and transmittal, it also speeds the order process by associating the incoming fax with an existing record.’
Challenges
Physician practices that use the EHR provider’s services for medical billing can submit information three ways: fax, overnight delivery or uploading scanned documents at the medical office.
Medical billing services generate a lot of documents – electronic and paper, depending on how physician practices transmit the information. Information must be processed quickly because of service level agreements that the company has with its clients.
Excellent Customer Service
“They’re always just an email away.”
Regardless of format or type of document, a crucial step in the process is to index every piece of paper. Only after indexing is complete does a worker with a medical background review the documentation for billing and claims. Any delays in the first review that could be caused by unreadable faxes or illegible handwriting can slow the revenue cycle.
Solution and Results
Realizing that it needed to streamline the documentation process to improve the revenue cycle for its clients, the large EHR solution provider turned to zPaper for its expertise in electronic documentation. The custom zPaper indexing solution works with submitted documentation regardless of format, sorting stacks of documents and relating them to previous records, where applicable.
Using a fax and automation solution from zPaper, the medical billing service provider has been able to streamline formerly manual processes to speed response time and improve the company’s performance on its SLAs.
During the sorting process, the zPaper system extracts identifying information about each patient encounter, including which medical office, patient name, date of birth, medical record number and other data. The indexer can view each encounter document as a PDF, noting what type of document it is and appending rejection codes to anything that can’t be read. A rejection code automatically generates an electronic document that’s sent to the physician office for review and correction.
Automating the process of receiving, reviewing and parsing patient encounter information from physician practices has been greatly improved since the adoption of the zPaper solution. Not only do the time and efficiency gains help maintain service levels, it also speeds the revenue cycle process for its clients.
And nothing instills loyalty and repeat business like improving the time in which physicians get paid.
