Today, medical billing services form an essential pillar for streamlining operations in the healthcare industry. These services form the backbone of financial health by helping ease routine administrative functions while enhancing revenue cycle management. A Grand View Research report suggests that the global medical billing outsourcing market could reach $19.7 billion by 2026. The introduction of medical billing staffing and outsourcing has also helped ensure accuracy and compliance in the medical billing industry. So, medical billing staffing has become a prevalent option.
Medical billing staffing refers to finding medical billing experts for a company or organization. Medical billing staffing could be a far better option than in-house staff in an aggressive business environment, where increasing revenues, streamlining operations, and lowering costs are critical. These days, the future of medical billing staffing is bright as the rising demand for seamless and smooth healthcare operations bolsters it. Let us look at the emerging trends and technologies in medical billing staffing.
Emerging Trends in Medical Billing
As discussed earlier, maintaining an adequate supply of medical billing staff is critical to prevent any shortfall in revenue targets. However, skilled medical billers in local markets are generally in short supply. This has made it difficult for providers to maintain adequate medical billing staff for their needs. Some of the trends are discussed below:
The trend is to outsource this requirement overseas to save costs and access a better-skilled and talented pool of medical billing professionals. Due to the availability of better technology, seamless integration between offshore staff and the local medical billing process is now possible. These days, hiring a wide range of specialist resources, from entry-level billers to senior medical billing specialists, is possible.
Outsourcing medical billing to medical billing experts allows you to allocate more resources to other vital aspects of your business. It will enable you to achieve better payment rates, increased compliance with healthcare regulations, and even faster cash flow. It also offers better savings, profits, and consistency.
Emerging Technologies in Medical Billing
The use of technology has undoubtedly transformed the medical billing industry. Unlike in the past when this industry lagged in adopting new technologies, the use of technology has grown by leaps and bounds. Technologies such as Artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning have made a mark in medical billing. Today, several healthcare providers are investing in outsourcing medical billing as it allows them to focus more on patient care and less on mundane administrative tasks. Let us study these emerging technologies briefly:
Automation
The healthcare industry is increasingly adopting automation to improve and streamline clinician workflow and positively address the issue of physician burnout. It has been observed that automation increases accuracy and efficiency for various professionals in the healthcare industry. Automation has proved highly beneficial for online scheduling, appointment reminders, and patient check-ins. Automation also saves immense time and is also helpful in decreasing delays and denials in reimbursement. Additional benefits include comprehensive reporting, more thorough documentation, and allowing staff to accomplish more work in less time.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI and machine learning are becoming increasingly popular in the healthcare industry due to their apparent advantages. Besides providing accuracy and automating many time-consuming tasks, they allow employees to focus on other operational tasks. By integrating into billing workflows and prioritizing work queues for resubmitting denied claims, AI helps cut costs and increase patient satisfaction. Thus, AI can verify and correct patient demographic information and customize billing statements. Yet another technology on the horizon is computer-assisted coding (CAC). According to a recent study, this technology helps increase coder productivity by more than 20% while lowering coding time by 22% compared to those coders who did not utilize this technology.
EHR Integration
Although this technology isn't a recent trend, it is expanding rapidly. Today, as almost 86% of office-based physicians use an EHR system, it pays to integrate a medical billing system into EHR software. The advantages of this step are diverse—you can benefit from in-depth reporting capabilities and the ability to perform digital payment processing. Additionally, you obtain several other benefits, including improved efficiency as you do away with the need to fax and photocopy every bill, decreased coding errors through cleaner claims, and reduced paperwork due to eliminating filling out of forms manually.
Endnote
As indicated earlier, the future of medical billing is bright with the emergence of several new technologies and better trends. OmniMD is a New York, USA-based revenue cycle managed services provider that specializes in affordable remote medical billing workforce solutions. We can help you with trained medical billing specialists and remote medical billers to support you remotely on any available contractual, temporary, or permanent position in your organization. Contact us to learn more!