How to Reduce Your Optometry Practice's Accounts Receivable Cycle by 50% with Smart Billing
Is your eye care practice facing cash flow problems and high accounts receivable (AR)? Have you ever wondered where your revenue is hidden?
Professional fees account for approximately 55% of total revenue in optometry practices. This encompasses medical eye care, examinations, and treatment. More people have medical insurance and vision plans, so it’s possible to lose money. Keeping track of all the details is a problem for any eye care office. It ensures that your claims are filed and paid on schedule.
How can you increase sales while lowering accounts receivable? Let’s look at some frequent difficulties, solutions, and marketing techniques. These will assist your practice reduce the number of days that accounts receivable go unpaid and remain in the aging bucket.
Common Issues with Accounts Receivable
We cannot emphasize enough how crucial it is to review your accounts receivable to avoid significant cash flow issues. If you file claims often and publish remittances quickly, your accounts receivable should show the real value of pending claims needing your focus. If claims aren’t filed, or if they’re denied, your accounts receivable reports will be wrong. Let’s examine three optometry offices that work with our Fast Pay Health team. We’ll go over their key accounts receivable difficulties and the remedies we implemented to lower their aging bucket.
PRACTICE #1 : Provider Credentialing, Enrollment, and Incorrect Codes
Problems with group enrollment procedures and submitting accurate codes and modifiers. The practice has over $37,000 in outstanding 60-day aging buckets.
Solution: Simplified provider credentialing and group enrollment processes for all insurance payers. The accounts receivable Aging bucket now costs $3,700, a 90% decrease.
PRACTICE #2 : Denied Medicare Claims
Challenge: Cash flow was extremely poor, with $160,000 in the outstanding 60+ day Aging bucket.
Solution: Fixed code and modifier issues. Also rectified incorrect information on disallowed Medicare claims for nursing homes. accounts receivable was quickly decreased to $112,000. This was accomplished by simply amending the refused Medicare claims.
PRACTICE #3 : Rejected or Denied Claims
Challenge: $10,000+ in excellent 30-120 day aging buckets.
Solution: We thoroughly evaluated and cleansed every rejected and denied claims. Then we made corrections to reclaim the outstanding money. Fast Pay Health ensured that new claims were clean and error-free before they were filed. Within 30 days, the 30-plus outstanding Aging bucket had decreased to $2,000.
Increase Cash Flow with These 10 Optometry Billing Strategies
To reduce our accounts receivable and increase top-line revenue, consider following steps:
- Improve your invoicing speed to get paid faster.
- Offer early payment rebates to encourage promptness.
- Reduce delays by streamlining your collecting process.
- Focus on building customer relationships to increase loyalty and repeat sales.
- Analyze sales data to spot trends and adjust pricing.
- Increase marketing efforts to attract new customers.
- These activities can help to increase cash flow and boost our bottom line.
- That’s where our intelligent billing strategies come in.
1. Submit your claims every day.
Many large medical payers process claims within 5 to 7 business days. Some pay at the same time each month or even every week, such as on Fridays, the 15th, or the final day of the month.
Submit your claim on the same day as your appointment, or within one business day. This keeps claims flowing and ensures they are paid immediately. Filing claims even once a week can help your accounts receivable develop quickly. This leads to a larger backlog, which frequently results in more billing problems.
2. Collect co-pays, coinsurance, and deductibles up front.
Collect co-pays, coinsurance, or deductibles as you check in or out. Always complete this before the patient leaves the office.
For a five-day workweek over four weeks, think about this: If you see 20 patients each day and each has a $15 co-pay, you’ll end up losing $1,200. That is money you may receive upfront rather than invoicing later.
3. Make patient invoicing a priority
The longer it’s been since a patient’s visit, the harder it is to collect the balance owed.
Sending invoices early can reduce accounts receivable delays. It helps avoid late payments and boosts your chances of getting paid on time. Open balances also produce an inaccurate view of your accounts receivable.
4. Assist patients in understanding their bills.
Patients often ignore medical bills due to confusion. This leads to unpaid bills for you. Check your current statement or invoice to ensure it is simple to grasp, and always mention a due date. Maintain contact with your patients in between visits to ensure that bills do not fall between the cracks.
5. Offer Electronic Billing Options.
Consider adding electronic patient billing to your EHR portal or website. This allows for online payments. Online bill payments help you lower past-due balances. They also save staff time. You won’t need to chase payments, mail bills, or collect money by phone. Plus, you can avoid manually recording payments. Get paid faster with SMS and email reminders.
Many eye care patient portals connect with EHR and practice management systems. This lets them post payments instantly. As a result, it saves time on re-keying billing data. Letting your patients use a secure portal anytime—whether at home or on the go—makes your relationship with them stronger.
6. Use automatic payment reminders.
Think about using an automated patient reminder service. It can send voice, text, and email messages to remind patients when their payments are due. If you take online payments, your message can tell people to call your office or log into their patient site.
7. Post Remittances When You Receive Them.
Delays in posting payments will keep your accounts receivable artificially high, and you may miss denials. Don’t assume that getting EFT payments means you can post later. Some payers have strict refiling rules. These rules limit your chance to challenge a claim after the remit date.
You can move funds to secondary insurance quickly. It only takes one to two days to handle remittances. This speeds up billing. Alternatively, you can transfer the patient’s balance due and generate a statement. It gets more difficult to collect payments the longer it has been since the patient’s last visit.
8. Make a Payment Calendar.
Not all payers stick to a regular payment schedule, but you can usually handle the major ones first. Keep an eye on the dates of the checks that arrive to see if there is a pattern. Knowing when you have a lot of payments to deal with helps you plan for the rest of the week.
9. Scrub claims to lower denials.
Are you focusing on those pesky claims that do not go through? Are you confirming insurance information and ensuring that charge entries are accurate? Was it a non-covered service? Was it linked to the wrong diagnosis? Did it miss a modifier? Or was it bundled with another procedure?
Accurate information affects reimbursements. Clean and accurate claims get paid faster. Make sure your claims are clean and free from errors before you submit them.
10. Investigate Unpaid or Aging Claims
Do you go through your aging claims on a daily basis to see why open balances remain outstanding? Pay particular attention to rejections on clearinghouse reports and denials on remittances. If your patients have supplementary insurance, you may experience timely filing denials. Most payers want you to bill secondary insurance within 180 days after you get the first payment.
Check claims sent through clearinghouses. Look up their status on payer websites. Call payers to ask about missing payments. Check if there’s no remittance available.
Remember the name of the payer representative you talked to during your chat. This info might be useful later. Research problems right away when posting, or note any claims with errors on a remit. Then, check those claims after publishing.
- Investigate any claims older than 30 days. Sometimes, the payer might still be processing the claim. If you know which payers take longer, you can focus on those that pay quickly.
Reduce the Accounts Receivable Cycle with a Comprehensive Optometric Billing Service.
Unpaid claims research takes time; it can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour to look into a single claim. Fast Pay Health offers a dedicated billing solution. Our experts handle your accounts receivable cleanup and insurance follow-up every day. Request a free practice analysis today, and we’ll find a time that works for you. We do more than just process insurance and vision plan claims. We can work with any EHR or practice management software for ophthalmology and optometry. We get paid when you get paid.
