Monday, February 20, 2012

Medical Coding and billing services for lowering healthcare costs

The physicians can easily outsource these additional tasks to service providers and concentrate only in providing better healthcare services to patients. The need is to delegate major tasks, such as document management and billing responsibilities to outside agencies. The healthcare facilities not only will have additional time available for the welfare of the patients, they also will have the benefit of saving huge costs.

Let us evaluate the costs for both, documenting patient's records as well as medical coding processes. A healthcare facility pays approximately $14 to $15 an hour to a skilled medical transcriber in the United States, and added to that are other cost such as setting up computers and software for the in-house medical transcription and billing divisions.

The healthcare facilities incur a cost of 35¢ for documenting a line of 65 characters of a patient's medical record. The outsourced companies based in India or Philippines are able to document the same line cost for just 9¢ to 10¢, this is a huge cost difference that can save hospitals or clinics millions of dollars annually.

Likewise, each medical coder and biller cost the healthcare providers $35,000 to $45,000 annually, and in comparison the outsourced companies that provide medical coding billing service charge as little as 2% of the total claim reimbursed by the insurance companies, surely this operation too if outsourced can save huge revenue.

The medical transcription services including billing and coding, is provided through the internet, the outsourced companies that are based in remote locations setup a Virtual Private Network with an EMR application that is in use by the hospital or a clinic. The IT division enables a login access for the medical transcribers and billers/coders fordocumenting the narrations of the physicians, for the billing process the insurance claims are documented by the logged in billers of the remote location company.

The advantage that this arrangement offers to a healthcare facility is that patient's confidential healthcare records stay within the hospital or clinics EMR application, which is a mandatory HIPAA regulation. Another benefit that these companies offer is a quicker turn-around-time, which is just 12 hours for documenting physician narrations and about 48 hours for billing documents. The sooner healthcare facilities explore the feasibility of setting up this arrangement the better it shall be for providing patient care at lowered costs.
Author:physicianbiller
Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/

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