Practice Management Alert

Whether you're the office manager or billing employee, you have a vested interest in stacking your collections team with the best players and keeping them in shape.

But assessing job performance isn't as easy as simply looking at the accounts receivables (A/R). Many other factors go into figuring out what makes a good collector in your practice and how to assess your staff performance, says Jennifer Darling, billing lead and compliance officer at the Center for Oncology Research & Treatment and owner of BBC Medical Management Services in Dallas. Factors contributing to job performance include:
size of practice
number of physicians each collector handles
number of line items per claim
ratio of charges to payments received
payer mix, and much more. Given all these variables, only your office can develop a fair and accurate assessment guide that works for you, but here are a few pointers that help no matter what specialty and practice you bill for. Your 3-Prong Assessment Program Your job evaluation for collectors should include an assessment of how the A/R is managed and collected, a review of the aging sheet, and an examination of charges versus payments, says Kim McDonald-Buckley, a physician coding and reimbursement expert at Practice Performance Inc. in Dallas. Your job description for collectors should already have detailed what's expected of A/Rs, aging sheets and charges versus payments. 1. Assess the A/R. Experts differ on how much A/R reports should factor into job performance evaluations, but one thing's for sure: They at least partially reflect your collector's performance. A/R reports can tell you whether your collector is cleaning up billing messes, identifying errors in data entry and coding, posting correctly, and following up on requests in a timely fashion, says Andrea D. Parker of the Physician's Hearing Aid Center in Arlington, Texas. Consider comparing your collector's A/Rs to national averages for your specialty and payer mix. 2. Review the aging sheets. Take a hard look at your collector's aging sheets. If your collector's aging sheet stays the same or has never gone down since the job began, or if it increases, then the collector is not following up on charges, McDonald-Buckley says. You want to make sure the collector is working old claims, she adds. Verify that your collector writes off or sends to outside collections claims that remain unpaid. "There's no point in keeping uncollectible dollars on the books," McDonald-Buckley says. That requires time and energy. Reviewing aging sheets may tell you, at the other extreme, that your collector is writing off charges just to get them off the aging sheets, Darling adds. 3. Examine how charges compare to payments. An evaluation of charges and payments will [...]