Building Sustainable HME Billing Mandates

Understanding Common Challenges in HME Billing

Amidst the plethora of insurance payers offering health plans of all shapes and sizes, HME billing has seldom been more complex than now. Although the proliferation of online transactions has made submitting claims remarkably fast and easy than ever, the huge number of players in the market today, each with its own set of rules and regulations, make HME billing an area prone to frequent errors. Missing out on a required piece of information, or failing to furnish a supporting document, can lead to reimbursements getting denied and submitted claims being denied or turned down.

It is evident from the scenario described above that HME billing requires personnel with not just specialized knowledge in the area, but also with thorough familiarity with the latest developments in billing and compensation norms. This is possibly one reason why HME practices employing shared resources in their billing affairs seldom reach the levels of efficiency and excellence they wish for.

So, is there an easy way to quickly find dedicated people to take care of all your HME billing requirements? Let us investigate, along with how such resources can be kept effectively updated with all the latest changes in payer norms and regulations.

Building a Better Billing Desk

The local job market in the US is currently battling with an acute scarcity of skilled labor, a situation that has been aggravated by the recent pandemic. To make matters worse for businesses, healthcare workers are demanding a hike in minimum wages in many states, pointing to a steep rise in operational cost. In the face of all such difficulties, healthcare practices are enthusiastically outsourcing their billing, back-office and other administrative tasks to specialized, third-party service providers.

HME billing is a case in point. A large number of HME practices have already outsourced their billing and coding tasks to offshore medical billing companies who are efficiently handling them with remarkable economy. More and more healthcare practices of all kinds are quickly joining their ranks. One of the main advantages of outsourcing is getting an almost instantaneous access to trained and skilled billers, without having to worry about how to find them, training them, overhead expenses and so on.

Another benefit of outsourcing billing processes to a billing agency is the degree of dedicated attention that comes with such an association. The outcome includes reduced errors, lowered denials and a rapid increase in collections with more claims getting passed than before.