5 Common Medical Billing Errors and How to Avoid Them

The intricacies of medical billing and coding make it complex to manage and streamline. But, even a trivial billing error can lead to claim denials, expensive lawsuits, impact patient care, and eventually revenue loss. Understanding the medical billing process and taking a new approach to avoid billing mistakes can help maximize your practice reimbursement.

This blog gives a detailed insight into the five most common medical billing errors and tells you about the ways to avoid billing mistakes at your healthcare practice.

Coding Issues or Errors

Not keeping up with the latest medical coding guidelines which keep changing constantly can impact your practice’s reimbursement process as using an outdated code leads to claim denial. Moreover, if your staff enters a wrong code or incorrect date, or incorrect patient name, it will automatically lead to a coding mistake and increase the chances of claim rejection and re-claim submission, and delayed reimbursement.

Missing Information

Overlooking a piece of missing information is one of the most common medical billing errors most practices encounter. Missing information increases your chances of receiving a claim rejection. Basic information such as date of birth or gender if left blank, claims can be denied. So, ensuring the highest accuracy while claim filing is of utmost importance. Your staff must double-check all the claims and fill in all the required fields before the final claim submission.

Missed Filing Deadlines

Sometimes, even if your staff has filed your practice’s claims accurately, they forget to submit them within the deadline, increasing the risk of claim rejection. This is a common medical billing error that occurs due to billing loads and negligence of your billing staff. Providers must have enough billing staff if they have an in-house billing team or outsource to a reliable medical billing company to avoid sending claims after the end date.

Duplicate Billing

When your billing staff bills the same procedure several times, it creates room for duplicate billing. This leads to increased medical costs and results in re-submission of the claim and therefore, rework and delayed payment collection. The consequence of duplicate billing can be also losing a patient’s trust in your healthcare practice. This issue can be prevented with prompt chart audits.

Unbundling Medical Procedures

When there is a single code for an entire group of medical procedures, but separate codes have been used for linked procedures, it is known as unbundling. This may be an intentional or unintentional coding issue that increases a patient’s medical bills and lead to penalties along with reputational loss.

How can you avoid these common medical billing errors?

• File medical claims within deadlines. 
• Keep up with medical billing and coding trends.
• Hire a professional medical biller or outsource to a medical billing company
• Ensure double-checking while filing claims 
• Maintain accurate Electronic Health Records
• Ensure a service is not billed more than once

Capline Healthcare Management is a reliable medical billing company in the United States that has assisted more than 400 providers in streamlining their practice medical billing process and reduced billing error to zero, increased clean claim submission rate, and optimized the financial performance of their practices. Outsourcing your medical billing to us can help you prevent billing issues that lead to claim rejections.