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Medical billing carries out the activity of putting forward the claims to the Insurance companies so as to receive the payments for the expenses incurred on the patient for the medical purpose. The process of medical billing is the same for the government or the private institutions.
With the arrival of computers it is possible to professionally administer a large amount of patients data and the laborious task has been simplified to great extent. Special softwares are available in the market these days for medical billing. And a few are freely available on the Internet.
Medical billing connects the insurance company with the provider. The patient is examined and depending on the disease estimate expense of the medical treatment is given to the insurance companies. At times the company where the patient works pays for the expenses prior to the treatment and later the amount recovered by the companies of insurance. Hence the patient is relieved of the expenses incurred.
The patient’s medical history, his disease, diagnosis and the recommended treatment are maintained in the record. The information is then provided to the billing recording companies, which maintain the complete record of the patients. The claim is then submitted to the clearinghouse or directly to the insurance companies.
The insurance companies prefer a clearinghouse to serve as an intermediate because they validate the claim as per the policy of the assurance companies. If the set standard is not met then the declaration is sent back to the patient for the corrections. This makes the process simpler and faster. The validation is done by the insurance company before paying for the amount. If the patient fails the test the claim is rejected and the further insurance of the individual is cancelled too.
If the patient still considers himself as a right candidate he can always submit the claim again.
Before placing the claims both the patient and the medical practitioner should be made aware of the rules and regulations of the insurance companies. The rates are negotiated with the doctors and are less than the actual fees charged by the physician and are called an allowable amount. The statement of the transactions is then sent to the patient after the amount for the treatment is paid.
At times the full payment of the expenses not undertaken by the insurance company and the patient has to pay the rest of the amount in installments to the doctor or the medical institutions. The amount paid by the patient is called coinsurance. Most of the medical billing work is outsourced to the foreign countries, which makes the task easier and achieves the billing work to be done 24*7. Several BPOs take up the job work of medical billing and again a few IT enabled companies too.
What is required is to have skilled manpower and trained professionals. Again, most of the billing work is outsourced to India as it has mature health care institutions, trained billing professionals, software professionals and skilled manpower. State of art training is provided for this cutting edge technology and set up is arranged for the training of new comers in this industry.
What is most important in this medical billing is to stick to the quality norms as laid down by the industry and the government. ISO 9000 is laid down as a quality standard for the medical billing activities. Several billing softwares are designed and deployed specifically for the billing jobs which are handy to learn and use with no more complications, what is requires is a graphical user interface and a database connected to it for the to and fro query processing of the records.
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