Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

So you've got a handle on your accounts receivable (A/R) and you know roughly how long it takes to get paid once you submit a bill. Congratulations -- now you're ready to get started.

Getting a grip on your days in A/R is only half the battle.You can't have any A/R unless you actually bill something.So you need to know how long it takes your practice to bill for services after you provide them. You also need to measure whether you're billing all the services that you provide.

The goal is for your gross charges to be higher than the year before, Tinsley explains.

Many practices either don't measure things like days in A/R or gross charges, or else they don't know what to do with those numbers once they have them.

Then the next thing to track is collections. If your charges are going up but your collections are going down,you need to investigate why.

Keep in mind: If your practice has declining profitability, don't succumb to the temptation to cut staff, Tinsley urges. If anything, this may be a signal that you need to hire an extra person to speed up billing or work on collections.

"When you start cutting out overhead as a knee jerk reaction to profitability, you are harming the practice,"Tinsley says. "You can nickel and dime overhead but you can't significantly cut it without harming the practice. The whole focus of management should be how to grow the top line."

Best bet: Create a long-term plan to address the issue of declining profitability by identifying the real issues your practice is facing and creating ways to tackle them -- rather than using a "Band-Aid solution" of cutting people, Tinsley says.