Pain Management Billing Services
The Complexities of Pain Management Billing
Pain management specialists deal with patients who are suffering, and they know how important treatment is—but payers are often extremely critical of billing for pain treatment when the cause isn’t something that shows up on an x-ray or has a disease diagnosis. Recent regulations have increased scrutiny of medications used for pain and the penalties for misuse to the extent that many doctors refuse to practice pain management. Working with a specialized pain management medical billing company can help navigate these complexities and ensure maximum reimbursement.
Coding and Billing Errors
With these inherent hurdles to deal with, it becomes even more important that practitioners aren’t burdened by Pain Management billing issues. Across all fields of medicine, institutions are cutting costs and payers are looking for ways to reduce what they pay, including being very particular about billing and coding errors, which result in claims being rejected or denied.
Billing Challenges for Pain Management Centers & Practitioners
It’s possible for Pain Management Centers to offer fewer pain management services as compared with other health care providers because more than 100 million Americans experience chronic pain. An examination of the most common issues in pain management billing services revealed these common challenges.
Claim Denial Management
Rejection or denial of claims for the tiniest errors is common. Every letter must match the patient record exactly, and payers do not even try to determine what was meant if something seems amiss. The pain management billing RCM process relates to every aspect of patient care from patient intake information to payment collection, so there are innumerable errors that can be made in entering just the right information.
Administrative Delays
Many pain management practices manage claim denials by a very laborious manual process done by in-house staff. This results in slow claim submission and increased labor costs. Outsourcing pain management billing services to a team of specialists can significantly improve claim denial resolutions, case mix performance and the time claims are in accounts receivable
Increased Financial Responsibility of Patients
An analysis conducted by Trans Union Healthcare in 2017 found that patients’ healthcare providers costs had increased by up to 11%. Rapidly increasing patient costs mean it is more important than ever to inform patients about their financial responsibility prior to treatment fully. The increased costs are also making it more difficult for pain management practices to collect the amount due to them. Partnering with a specialized pain management billing company can help address these challenges and improve the collection process.
