In the world of medical billing, every aspect involved in the billing process plays a major role in an efficient revenue cycle management. Payment posting in Medial Billing is one such factor which is crucial for maintaining the revenue cycle of healthcare organizations.
Every aspect of medical billing and coding plays a major role and shares equal importance in getting a claim reimbursed.
Payment posting in medical billing refers to entering the payments received for treatments either fully, partially or denied payment, into the billing software. The quality and accuracy of payment postings are as important as any other scope of service in RCM.
Accurate payment posting ensures a strong cashflow and smooth revenue cycle management. No healthcare organization or individual practitioner can overlook payment posting.
So, let's learn in depth about payment posting and its importance.
What is Payment Posting
Payment posting seems like a simple idea, but it is the most important step of revenue cycle management. The process involves examining payments transacting within a medical business. It keeps track of the financial situation of the organization.
The posting is done after a medical procedure is completed. The process gives deep insights about these types of daily incoming payments:
- Incoming Patient Payments: These payments can be offered in cash checks, or credit cards. The payments received must be reconciled with the patient’s account.
- Tracking Insurance Checks from ERA: This type of payment gets processed in batches. This is done by importing the transactions into practice management systems. Each batch is reviewed separately to identify any sort of exceptions. All the batches must be addressed properly.
- Accessing Insurance Payments Through Explanations of Benefits: these payments can be tracked through Electronic Health Records and secure FTPs.
- Denial Posting: If a medical practice wants to receive the account receivable accurately, they must post claim denials within a certain time frame. When insurance payer resubmits a denied claim, the biller must record each denial in the practice management system.
Types of Payment Posting
There are two types of payment postings which are: Manual and Auto.
- Manual Posting: This type of posting is done by the administrative staff and usually takes longer. This type of payment posting can face delays due to various problems such as typos or inaccurate coding.
- Auto Posting: Auto payment posting enhances the speed of medical billing process. It is a software driven approach which is more reliable when it comes to collecting revenue. This method is very fruitful for big organizations where patient footfall is high. It helps them build better control over the billing process.
Benefits of Accurate Payment Posting
Whether you manage your medical billing internally or partner with a medical billing company, make sure that the payment postings are always accurate with no scope of error. A strategic payment posting procedure brings along a lot of benefits.
Payment posting can affect a lot of aspects of your business. Two major examples of the same are patient care and financing. Let's understand the benefits of accurate payment posting.
Comprehensive Financial Tracking
All and every type of business track their finances and healthcare industry is no different. Accurate payment posting helps the providers and organizations keep track of their financial transactions.
It provides deep insights into the entire financial health of the business. Accurate payment postings offer a clear and comprehensive record of services provided during the treatment procedure.
This depicts the financial picture of the healthcare organization. Having a clear understanding of the financial aspects helps healthcare organizations locate opportunities to increase their revenue.
Payment Posting also helps organizations and individual practitioners collect their reimbursables in the fastest way possible.
Timely Payments
Having a proper payment posting process ensures the processing and reimbursements are streamlined. This triggers a steady flow of funds minimizing delays. Some major services through payment posting includes posting and recognizing claim denials.
Once you take medical billing services, it will help you uncover the procedures which require prior authorization. Having a proper payment posting process will address claim denials so you can be assured that the revenue will follow soon.
Maintaining electronic health record helps in updating a patient’s account which helps the billers get insights of the covered services, received payments and more.
Using strong payment posting procedures, financial records are more likely to be accurate. This reduces the chances of denials and other billing problems significantly.
Catching errors before they happen is a major benefit of a proper payment posting procedure. It is obvious that you won’t have to address the denials in the first place. Practices that do not take care of this process may have to wait for days or even weeks to get reimbursables.
Handling medical billing and coding will always be full of hassles. Especially when dealing with hundreds of claims, errors are destined to happen. However, if you take medical billing services from an expert organization, you need not worry about the errors anymore.
EOB and ERA Processing
Explanation of Benefits (EOB) describes claim procedures as well as any patient duties. It includes co-insurance, deductibles, and co-payments.
Electronic Remittance Advice (ERA) gives the provider an explanation of the patient’s insurance process.
When payment postings are done accurately, it ensures that the data in both EOB and ERA meet the payment requirements. It allows for a practical overview of the organization's financial health status.
It is very important for organizations to review EOBs and ERAs thoroughly. Especially before entering data in the billing software, ensuring that it is error free is a must. This helps them understand any changing trends which might affect the denial rates.
Bottomline
A Comprehensive payment posting service produces an efficient revenue flow. This fosters the organization’s financial health by avoiding inaccurate postings. This reduces huge potential bumps in the revenue cycle road such as claim denials, inaccurate records, or incorrect patient data.
Managing the payment postings on your own can be a hassle for you. To reduce this hassle, Unify Healthcare Services provides the best medical billing services to individual practitioners as well as healthcare organizations.
Unify Healthcare Services is a medical billing company in USA which provides unmatched medical billing services. We have trained professionals who are very proficient with all the aspects of medical billing and coding.
We are always updated about the latest changes in guidelines and provision set by the government or the insurance providers. Our trained experts will take away all the hassle from your shoulders so you can focus only on providing the best patient care.
Unify Healthcare Services envisions making billing easy for every healthcare provider so they can provide the best patient care.
