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Minimizing Accounts Receivable Days (AR Days) in a Pediatric Practice

July 20, 2012 in Billing and Collections by support Team  |  1 Comments

All practices have accounts receivables. There is a wide distribution of how efficiently Pediatric practices manage the revenue cycle to minimize the amount of revenue in accounts receivable. A common measure in the industry for benchmarking how well a practice manages the revenue cycle is Accounts Receivable Days or more commonly known as AR Days. What are AR days? Let’s look at an example. If a practice has an average of $100,000 in gross charges a month and currently has $200,000 in accounts receivable (waiting to be paid by insurance companies and patients), the practice has approximately 60 AR Days. All practices should continue to optimize their processes and systems until the practice consistently operates at less than 30 AR days.

There are many inefficiencies that slow down the revenue cycle for practices. For instance, some practices leave a copy of all their charges each week for a biller to ‘pick up’ then send to the insurance company. The biller/billing company then needs to enter these charges in their system, review and send to the clearing house. In some cases, at least two weeks pass prior to the claim being uploaded to the insurance company. I am aware of some hospital systems that wait to the end of the month to send all claims – what a wasteful practice! A strong Pediatric Billing company measures, monitors and benchmarks these processes and looks for ways to improve the AR days for the practice. This usually requires best practice sharing and routine evaluation of pain points in the revenue cycle. This is difficult for an average biller of a practice to do successfully due to their time and focus need to focus on the daily management of claims. Pediatric practices are dependent on the practices systems, processes and back-end billing team to minimize the AR days for the practice.

Phase I Meaningful Use for Pediatric Practices: The Need to Change or Modify Practice Processes

May 18, 2012 in Blog, Healthcare Protocols and other Tech by support Team  |  Comments Off on Phase I Meaningful Use for Pediatric Practices: The Need to Change or Modify Practice Processes

I was on the phone with one of our valued customers this morning discussing Phase I Meaningful Use and the details on the “how” related to Meaningful Use. The overall goal of Health and Human Services is that providers utilize a certified E.H.R. in a meaningful way. A group of individuals invested months of discussions and feedback to obtain a list of parameters. One challenge for the group is to provide a universal list that applies across all fields of medicine. Some of the parameters in Pediatrics only apply to a certain segment of the population. For example, smoking status is for patients greater than 13 years of age. There are core measures that each provider needs to meet the benchmark for all these measures during the 90 day period being measured as well as selecting a list of 5 of the 10 menu measures.

A good E.H.R. system should provide a simple manner for a physician and/or Practice Administrator to evaluate performance of each of these benchmarks as well as very easily ‘drill down’ to identify how to correct/update patient data associated with the measure. How to use a meaningful use dashboard should take minimal training and review. The E.H.R. vendor should be able to guide an individual in the practice on the process via a web meeting or teleconference. So if you selected the ‘right’ E.H.R. system for Pediatrics, using the software and monitoring meaningful use should be straight forward.

The ‘tough’ part of Meaningful use: Changes to how the practice operates. For example, most practices did not record language, race and ethnicity as part of their intake/demographics. This needs to be captured for over 50% of patients seen during the 90 day measurement period for Phase I. If your E.H.R. system is well design, the practice should be able to click on a link and show the patients that do not have this information during the 90 day period. The most efficient way to enter this information is to capture the data when the patient visits the office. The “ah-ha” moment for many individuals is when they first run a meaningful use report, then they make the changes to their office flow and intake forms as needed.

Some questions to ask related to Meaningful use and your Pediatric Practice: Are we entering all medications in the system and sending medications via electronic prescriptions? Do we list the problems for each visit and maintain the patient problem list? Are we maintaining our Medication list and Allergy List? Does our standard protocol for demographics include recording smoking status of patients >13 years of age? Do we record vitals on each visit? Can we connect to the immunization registry? Are we connected to the lab companies that we send the majority of our labs?
This is not meant to be an a complete list of questions but a list to stimulate thinking around meaningful use. There are many resources, websites and references to obtain detailed information. Good luck on meeting Phase I Meaningful Use!