Cash Flow Private Medical Practice
4 Feb 2010 by M Reeves
Increasing speed of payment with electronic patient billing As a private health professional, you expect to be paid when you provide medical services to patients. Unfortunately, the hassle that comes with most billing procedures means it’s likely you won’t see any money from insurers for more than a month after treatment is given. If you’re tired of waiting weeks for payments to reach you from insurance companies, it may be time to consider a new billing method. Healthcode and Private Practice Manager offers two billing platforms that could be useful to your practice when upgrading your billing system: the HC VEDA e-biller and the ePractice Biller. Both programmes will drastically increase speed of payment, so either is a good choice for advancing your office technology. The HC VEDA system uses the Internet to securely validate bills and distribute them to private medical insurance companies, or PMIs. The benefit of using VEDA is its bills are ready to be loaded into an insurer’s payment system; the system automatically makes sure everything about the invoice is correct. Once you’ve submitted a patient’s billing records, VEDA does the rest, sending the bill to the appropriate PMI to await payment. The VEDA system generates a receipt for every bill it collects, so you’ll always know the status of your bills when you use this programme. With VEDA, bills are paid typically in one to two weeks. Healthcode’s other electronic billing system is the ePractice Biller, which, like VEDA, provides secure online billing and payment tracking. However, the ePractice Biller is not as sophisticated as VEDA in completing and validating billing information. With the Biller, invoices are auto populated with most billing data and users are prompted about information that specific insurers may need for processing the invoices. The user just adds any necessary information and a fee and submits the bill to the appropriate PMI. This system will also increase the speed of your payment drastically, but some problems may occur if information needed by the insurer is not entered correctly by the bill’s creator. Either method is much more effective at getting bills paid than traditional paper billing systems. With paper bills, payments can take many weeks to receive. There is also a much higher possibility of human error with paper bills, since much of the information is generated without the help of a computer system. Both the VEDA and ePractice Biller Systems will reduce human error, which means insurers are less likely to reject bills due to incomplete information. So in general, either system will improve your business.
