Medical Billing Guide

For those of you who are involved in the medical billing industry and don’t know what barcoding has to do with your job, hopefully, this installment on barcoding will give you just enough information to be informed and not so much as to confuse the stuffing out of you. Barcoding is kind of a behind the scenes process that ties in to your retail sales operation, if you have one.

In the world of medical billing, nothing is more dreaded by billing companies than allowable tables. There are numerous reasons for this. In this particular installment on medical billing, we’re going to cover the main reasons why allowable tables are such a pain the backside.

Medical billing agencies take a lot of things for granted. They purchase a piece of DME software in order to do their daily billing and they expect everything to run perfectly. Well, in the real world, it isn’t quite that simple. There is a lot of work that goes into putting out a piece of medical billing software. While we’re not going to attempt to dive into this process in great detail, we’re going to try to give you a decent idea of what goes into getting your DME software to you. In future installments, we’ll cover this in more detail.

In this world of technology, you have to wonder what would happen to the medical billing profession if suddenly all the power in the world went out and the computers stopped working. If you never thought of how catastrophic this would be, this little eye opening look at a hypothetical situation should get you thinking about having some backup plans for your medical billing business.

In this installment of medical billing, we’re going to examine some common problems that you may run into with one of the more common add-ons to a medical billing package, barcoding. We’ll not only examine the problems but give possible causes and solutions to them. Of course each case may be different.

In the medical billing world, we have gone way past the days of the clerk sitting in the doctors office punching out her bills by hand and popping them in envelops. Today, things are a lot more sophisticated. Bills are generated via computer and in some cases, the biller never even sees a piece of paper or a form. Yes, we’ve come a long way. Unfortunately, with this sophistication also comes a lot of headaches. Why? When you’re dealing with machines, especially computers, they have a tendency not to work right on occasion. This is especially true on the retail sales end of medical billing, the problems common to which we will be covering in this installment.

If you think the following scenario is uncommon, then you haven’t been in the medical billing industry long enough. What follows is a sample of what can go very wrong when billing Medicare for somebody’s, well, whatever it was supposed to be.

You’ve just got your DME software all setup. The patients are in, the inventory is in, the doctors and facilities are in, the insurance carriers are in and you’re ready to start billing.

In the world of medical billing, there is a lot of red tape. The government itself has so many regulations that they’re enough to strangle a billing company to the point where they can just about do business. And just when you thought that this problem would at least end with the software that you buy to do your billing with, you get hit with more red tape and regulations. In this installment, we’re going to discuss the issue of software registration, both on the end of the manufacturer and the biller.

The things that medical billing people take for granted. Open up your software, push a button, login. Push another button, get a patient menu. Push another button, pull up a patient. Click, click, click and the process goes on and on. Medical billers have no clue what is actually going on behind the scenes of their software. In the following installments and this is mainly for you tech heads, we’re going to show you exactly what goes on behind the scenes with your medical billing software with the main parts of the system. To cover everything would take a lifetime.

In a previous installment of medical billing goofs, we discussed what happens when you bill the wrong item to a carrier and how you can be charged with fraud, but what happens when you send a bill to the wrong carrier. What follows is a genuine story. It’s kind of funny when you read it, but the truth is, it’s far from funny. This is some serious stuff.