FEATURE sTOrY Survival Tips for Billing Services in the Evolving Healthcare Landscape ADAPT TO TRENDS TO PROVIDE MORE VALUE TO YOUR CLIENTS By Bill Marvin M any trends in healthcare payments affect the success of billing services, including new HIPAA and financial services regulations, the shift of payments from payors to patients, provider consolidation, and even health system insourcing of billing functions. Nevertheless, innovations in revenue cycle management technology are always disruptive and can immediately impact any billing service of any size. As new innovations are released into the marketplace, healthcare providers are increasingly empowered and tempted to manage healthcare payments on their own, without the help of billing services. However, billing services can also evolve and continue to find ways to add more value to their clients by adapting to these trends through new technology. This article offers tips to guide billing services through some of the recent trends in healthcare payments. Streamline Enrollment for New Clients To be able to manage electronic payments for a client, billing services must ensure that they are prepared for the risks associated with facilitating electronic payments directly into a client’s bank accounts. The compliance requirements for electronic payments are especially difficult to manage at the beginning of a working relationship, when a billing service has to obtain the necessary information and authorizations from the client. This process often includes a great deal of paperwork and delays as existing and new clients are set up. To streamline this process and facilitate scalability, billing services can accelerate the enrollment process and ensure the associated risks are managed properly with an enrollment process that is online and enables client self-service. a successful online enrollment tool should include the items on this checklist: ONLINE ENROLLMENT TOOL CHECKLIST a way to prepopulate known business information to minimize data entry Intuitive guides and FaQs for clients to reference to enable clients to help themselves automated communications that convey status of their account and next steps for clients to help themselves The assurance and trust that the process is secure and compliant with HIPaa and financial services regulations Access Reporting in One Place Once clients are enrolled for electronic payments, it is important to communicate periodically with clients using various reports. This reporting can really help create efficiencies and enable a billing service to scale across multiple clients. However, reporting on payments can be a multistep process involving logging in and out of multiple merchant and banking systems with multiple credentials, which is not scalable. Therefore, a successful periodic reporting process should follow this checklist: Billing services can use an enrollment process that is online and enables client self-service to accelerate the enrollment process and ensure the associated risks are managed properly. THe jOurNal OF THe HealTHCare BIllINg aND maNagemeNT assOCIaTION 17 QuICK TIP!
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