Practice Management Alert

Make sure your physicians and billing staff are on the same page.

The cornerstone of any successful relationship is communication, and that applies to the relationship between the physicians providing services in your practice and the billers collecting payment for them.
 
Maintaining communication between physicians and billers often is a challenge, because both parties are so busy. But it can be done - and it will make a big difference to your practice's bottom line.
 
The first thing you must do is figure out the best way to communicate with the physicians in your practice, says Jennifer Darling, insurance and collection specialist with the Center for Oncology Research & Treatment in Dallas. "It may be in person, or email, or notes written on the chart and placed in his stack of charts to review, or even a phone call or page if it's really important," she offers. The key is to find something that works and stick with it, Darling instructs. Physicians like consistency.
 
Another good way to keep physicians and billers working together is to hold monthly or quarterly meetings between the two, Darling says. These meetings can be used to address large issues, such as having physicians explain a new procedure or having billers explain a change to the code for an existing one.
 
These discussions are extremely important, because they illustrate to the physicians how vital it is that they communicate with billers, says Elizabeth Woodcock, director of knowledge management with Physicians Practice Inc. in Atlanta, Ga. For example, she offers, say a cardiology practice hires an electrophysiologist and doesn't tell the billing office. EP services often get denied for medical necessity. "How is the billing office going to work those denials if they don't know anything about what EP is, or even that EP exists?" Woodcock asks. Further, if the EP physician doesn't understand what a claim denial is, he probably won't be able to document appropriately to support an appeal.
 
Another effective communication tool is regular financial reports, Darling suggests. She periodically produces reports on things like the top five payers, the top five drugs/procedures being used and procedure analyses on a new code.

 "Doctors seem to really appreciate reports that give them financial or statistical data for their practice," Woodcock concludes.