Home Health & Hospice Week

Research every adjusted claim for accuracy, expert urges.

If you let your billing software do automatic cash posting, you could be throwing away hundreds of dollars per claim.

Many home health agencies don't realize that auto cash posting is a problem, warned billing expert Melinda Gaboury in her Oct. 3 presentation at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice annual meeting in Las Vegas. But it can be siphoning off significant Medicare dollars that you are entitled to.

Background: Auto cash posting occurs when a claim balance is automatically contracted off the books. For example, if a claim for $2,000 gets paid at $1,500 and automatically processes through the system, you lose that $500.

Every single adjusted claim must be researched, Gaboury exhorted. "You can't afford to do anything else," she stressed.

If your collector or cash poster looks into the adjustment and finds out it is legitimate, then it's no problem to write it off, Gaboury explained. But you should write off the balances only after doing the research.