Medical Billing and Coding are two different procedures, both are vital to obtain health care reimbursements. Medical coding includes collecting billable information from medical reports and health records, while medical billing uses those codes to establish health care statements for insurance and billing. The process begins with patient identification and concludes when a provider receives full payment for all his or her health care related services. Medical billing and coding processes may take from a handful of days to several months, based on the scope of the services provided like; handling claim denials, and how organizations receive financial responsibility from an individual.
Ensuring that insurance agencies grasp the principles of medical billing and medical coding, can help physicians and their workers run a seamless process and obtain payments for providing quality care provisions.
Traits of Medical Coding
If a patient encounter takes place, providers update the patient’s medical record outlining the treatment and facility and clarify whether he or she needs to receive any additional medical treatment, products, or procedures. During a hospital experience, full health data is crucial for a professional medical billing and coding expert, as per the AHIMA (The American Health Information Management Association). Insurance providers use clinical evidence to support payers’ reimbursement when a claim dispute occurs. If a claim is not properly reported by providers, the insurance provider will face a denial of liability and potentially a write-off.
Providers can also be subject to a health care deception or responsibility, as they try to charge payers and patients for services that have been wrongly reported in the medical records or that they have been entirely omitted from the patient records. When a health care provider discharges a patient from a hospital or the patient leaves the hospital, a professional medical coder checks and analyzes clinical medical data to link care with diagnosis, treatment, fee, and technical and/or facility code-related billing codes.
Prospects of Accurate Medical Billing
Medical Billing is the procedure of filing health care reports to different health insurance payors on behalf of the provider, to receive reimbursement for services provided in a medical facility. Medical billing services can take a lot from you, including the time and energy being spent on taking care of the patients.
GreenSense Billing offers medical billing and coding for all specialties with an all-in-one solution. Our secure medical billing software will help you with just a few clicks to handle all your treatment expenses, payments, and insurance premiums. Ensuring quicker reimbursements.
Usage of Artificial Intelligence in Medical Coding
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that over the period of ten years between 2014 and 2024, the number of medical coders in the United States will increase by 15 percent. But there are also fears that with these increasing number needs coders need to take up professional coding certifications.
Now, many hospitals rely on what are known as cliff codes. It is a database that a computer produces after a patient’s medical records have been processed. While a cliff note’s goal is to speed up the coding process, there are invariably hundreds of errors that a coder wants to rectify. These errors are cumulatively estimated to be worth $750 billion a year. The role of a coder has thus remained as important as ever.
But now several major hospitals and medical facilities have started working with machine learning and computer-aided coding (CAC) technologies backed by artificial intelligence. These solutions help detect bugs, repair codes, and generally assist the coders with real-time input to enhance their coding efficiency. No shock though, a survey by Frost & Sullivan forecasts the healthcare sector AI tools to be worth $6 billion by 2021.
Decreasing Costs with Technology
Computer learning and artificial intelligence in medical billing and coding roles have never fully replaced humans. They can, however, play an increasingly significant role in rising healthcare costs. According to one study, the United States pays nearly twice as much when compared to other nations like Australia, Britain, and France. Nearly a third of this goes simply towards medical billing and administrative costs.
Machine learning software can read any line in a medical report efficiently — this helps a hospital prevent repetitive costs, upcoding, and unbundling related mistakes. Nevertheless, the drive toward this may come from insurance companies, rather than from hospitals and smaller medical facilities themselves.
Discovering a Balance
A study conducted by the Royal Society showed that users were least concerned about the effects of artificial intelligence in health care related roles such as security, digital learning, and transportation. This is mainly because medical practitioners are now managing a relatively big portion of “front-end” health care. However, we cannot overestimate the effects of AI on back-end of health care. Besides making diagnosis more reliable and enhanced reporting, they could theoretically even drive down the country’s overall health care costs.
On the other hand, we should not expect computer learning and artificial intelligence to completely take over medical billing, coding and billing processes in health care. Possible problems of misdiagnosis and reporting mistakes are too great to run without human oversight. The ideal future is where these modern technologies would co-exist in perfect harmony with human coders that oversee the process to make the system as free from errors as possible.
