Improve Billing and Collections: Get the Money You Deserve Now Book

Improve Billing and Collections: Get the Money You Deserve Now offers a valuable overview of the collections process for a typical physician practice. Benefit from expert advice and information on such essential topics as fine-tuning the billing process, increasing in-office collections, improving third-party collections, and pursuing patient balances. This how-to book and accompanying CD-ROM also provides you with easy-to-implement strategies for improving your practice's financial health. For example, learn how adding alternative revenue streams such as ancillary services may improve your bottom line. Improve Billing and Collections also covers important payment trends such as consumer-directed healthcare.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer:LouAnn Schraffenberger, MBA, RHIA, CCS, CCS-P(Univ of Illinois at Chicago School of Biomed & Health Info Mgmt)
Description:This book and accompanying CD-ROM describes how to improve billing and collection processes in a physician practice. It includes such topics as improving the billing process, increasing in-office collections, improving third-party collections, and pursuing patient balances.
Purpose:The purpose is to provide an overview of the billing and collections process in a typical physician practice that will enable the physician to bill correctly and collect payment for services rendered.
Audience:The audience includes physicians, physician practice managers, and physician coding, billing, and collections staff. The publisher used a group of professionals to write the book including a medical director, practice administrator, healthcare attorney, and financial consultants. The publisher offers other books and resources for the management of physician practices or medical groups.
Features:The first of the book's four sections contains three chapters that address the revenue cycle, staff responsibilities, and the coding and auditing processes. The five chapters in section two cover the importance of in-office collections, patient referrals, consumer-directed healthcare, and alternative revenue streams. Section three addresses fee schedule updates, accounts receivables, relationships with payers, denied claim appeals, contract negotiations, and contract termination. Section four describes the collection process after the patient has been treated. The accompanying CD-ROM has a number of useful tools that can be customized for an individual physician practice or medical group. Sample documents are included for financial agreements with patients, noncovered services authorization and payment agreement, sample fee analyzer, telephone preauthorization form -- all of which would be very useful to a physician practice instead of the physician inventing from scratch.
Assessment:The book is compact and easy to read. It contains practical advice and guidance on managing the business aspect of the physician practice -- billing for services received and collecting payments due to physicians.