Urology Medical Billing: Boost Your Clinic’s Revenue
Urology medical billing is a rising process in healthcare organizations due to the growing number of urology cases with health complexities. Clinics and hospitals are in dire need of devising viable solutions to make it more efficient.
This blog will explore some of those solutions in the form of steps that healthcare organizations can implement. We will also discuss how efficient urology medical billing can simultaneously counter the increasing cases and grow your organizational revenue.
In addition, maximize your urology practice’s revenue with expert urology billing services, ensuring accurate and efficient billing processes. Learn more about our specialized urology billing solutions and improve your revenue cycle management.
What Is Urology Medical Billing?
The reasons for its complexity comprise the varieties in its medical coding and diagnoses. As a result, urology medical billing requires comprehensive knowledge and an extensive skill set. Your clinic must have the best medical urology billing specialists to handle its endless nuances.
Using Urology Medical Billing to Boost Clinic Revenue
Therefore, clinics must implement certain steps to make it more efficient, which will eventually lead to a boost in their revenue. These steps generally revolve around prior authorization, medical necessity, claim denials and many more operations.
1. Prior Authorization
Urology services can be quite expensive in terms of the medical bills generated for their patients. Therefore, hospitals and clinics have set a general standard to acquire approval from insurance providers before providing their urology services.
These approvals are mainly prior authorizations and are considered viable to boost organizational revenue. This way, insurance companies are in a better position to accurately comprehend the details of your urology procedures and treatments.
In addition, they consider your reimbursement claims aligned with their insurance terms and conditions. They will approve them as well, which will ultimately boost your revenue. Timely reimbursements mean a constant rise in cash flow and subsequently increased revenue.
2. Medical Necessity
Insurance companies also verify the medical necessity of your urology services for the relevant patients. They examine their medical condition and assess the details of their procedures and treatments.
This information is combined to decide whether those urology services are medically necessary for your patients based on their current health. This way, the insurers can also check whether you are appropriately charging those procedures for the expensive urology billing services.
Therefore, you have to justify your medical decisions and the derived service for specific urology patients. You can prevent claim denials and receive timely reimbursements with accurate justification. These upsides are bound to boost your revenue and contribute to overall growth.
3. Insurance Eligibility Verification
Claim denials are one of the most significant drawbacks of claims submission and can negatively impact your revenue. Insurance providers generally cite various reasons for denying reimbursement claims.
As an example, your claims may be denied due to your failure to follow the urology billing guidelines for the services. These guidelines are primarily based on the specific organ-based CPT codes that are assigned to specific urology treatments and procedures.
The codes lie within a range of serial numbers from 50010 to 58294. Furthermore, you can overcome reasons like this with an insurance eligibility verification of your patients. It can check whether their insurance coverage is eligible for the services assigned with those codes.
5. Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments
These amendments are important for healthcare proceedings as they derive certain legal framework standards. This framework defines how hospitals and clinics are directed to conduct their clinical laboratory tests.
The standards are applied to any medical facility that performs specific laboratory testing. You can perform various tests to obtain information about the relevant health assessments and their treatments or diagnoses.
You must update the applicable Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments based on the current standards set. The updates are important for all the lab tests invoiced by your clinic since they act as references for your patients.
6. Non-covered and Covered Services
There are two types of medical services in terms of their insurance coverage. Non-covered services are those healthcare procedures that the insurance companies deny. In contrast, the insurers approve covered medical services and can be availed.
You must distinguish between your patients’ non-covered and covered services before you provide them. Insurance providers reject the codes of non-covered services and do not pay for them. Non-covered services are different from supplemental services, which are partially paid.
You can incur a revenue loss if your clinic provides a non-covered service. The patient will not be able to pay for it on their own and their insurers will likely refuse to reimburse you. Therefore, you should only provide covered services to ensure that your revenue does not take a hit.
7. Modifier Inclusion
There are special circumstances in which medical practitioners may have to indicate an important distinction in their urology medical billing. The distinction has to be between multiple independent healthcare services provided on the same day.
You have to include Modifier 59 in such circumstances as it is a prominent standard set in the medical sector. This modifier reports certain healthcare services that may seem appropriate in those circumstances but are not normally reported together.
This is why the inclusion of Modifier 59 is important whenever you are executing urology practices. On the other hand, its absence creates discrepancies in your bills and confuses the insurers who may deny your claims. Claim denials will directly damage your revenue.
8. Provider Credentialing
Provider credentialing is another important process implemented by healthcare organizations in order to gain a reputable network status. You can also grow your network by contacting various insurance companies for your urologists.
This way, clinics can accredit their urology medical billing with as many insurers as possible to increase their reputation. Your front panel is likely to grow as a result of several incoming insurance providers in a value-based medical system.
This process also verifies how instantly you can receive the pending reimbursements for your urology services. A successful provider credentialing ensures that the claims are instantly approved and your healthcare organization achieves revenue gain and maximum profitability.
9. Fee Schedule Analysis
There are various fee schedules set by insurance companies that determine the timelines for their payment releases. Hospitals and clinics must regularly analyze them so that you align your reimbursements with their specific payment timings.
You should devise a list of your prominent urology procedures and treatments along with their codes. In addition, you can also compare them with the fee coverage of the insurers. This ensures that you are accurately conducting urology medical billing for your patients.
This way, healthcare organizations can also verify whether they are being appropriately reimbursed for their urology services or not. Moreover, you should always maintain updated deductible rates. More deductibles and fewer charges generate a smaller bill and revenue.
10. Carrier Contracts
Hospitals and clinics make carrier contracts with insurance companies that pertain to the establishment of network statuses between them. These contracts require the prior knowledge of doctors as they include technical details about specific urology procedures.
They also enable the creation of your professional relationship with the insurers and facilitate a smooth flow of reimbursements. You can easily negotiate your contracts and devise beneficial outcomes for your healthcare organization and its insurance companies.
Clinics must conduct urology medical billing through these carrier contracts to ensure that they are reimbursed in a timely manner. This leads to an optimized cash flow and subsequently contributes to overall revenue growth. You can also provide quality care to your patients.
11. Local Coverage Determination Rules
LCD rules are also set by insurance companies and have to be specifically followed for medical billing for urology. They are based on the medical necessity of your urology medical billing services and are applicable only to your healthcare organization.
You must adhere to these rules as Local Coverage insurers determine whether to release payments for certain procedures. These procedures are declared uncovered by the National Coverage. LC insurers specify policies for the injury or illness of your covered services.
Certain urology billing codes are dependent on these LCD rules and are noted as such. Therefore, you must verify their guidelines before assigning those codes to avoid irregularities. Irregularities can cause claim denials and revenue losses for hospitals and clinics.
The Bottom Line
This blog covered various aspects of urology medical billing and key factors that make it more efficient. We also analyzed how those factors can contribute to the overall revenue growth of hospitals and clinics. These factors can be implemented in various medical processes.
Our medical billing team has a diverse team of urology specialists to assist you with any urology medical billing query. Contact us today to learn how you can fine-tune your current urology services to boost your cash flow and revenue.