Medical Billing Virtual Assistant
Boost Your Practice’s Revenue and Efficiency with a Medical Billing Virtual AssistantWhat Is a Medical Billing Virtual Assistant?
A Medical Billing Virtual Assistant (VA) is a remote work specialist that handles talking to insurance companies for claims for your medical office. A medical billing assistant takes care of medical billing and coding and is in charge of managing all your office’s medical claims, invoices, and payments. They make sure that your medical billing process is covered from start to finish, leaving little room for information to fall through.
A medical billing VA can also help you keep track of one of the most important parts of running any business – cash flow, invoicing, and collections. This frees you up to concentrate on creating great and effective treatment plans for your patients, leading to better healthcare and better business.
Why Do I Need a Medical Billing Virtual Assistant?
A good medical billing process is integral to any clinic. After all, medical insurance billing is what keeps medical offices afloat. Clinics rely on money from private insurers as well as government programs like Medicare or Medicaid to get paid for the goods and services they provide, and without an efficient and timely billing process, cash flow will suffer. This will eventually lead to poorer office and personnel upkeep.
Proper medical claims billing isn’t just important for the clinic, either. A good medical billing process also protects patients. Accurate medical coding and billing ensure that patients aren’t charged more than they should be.
Medical billers are universally needed, and competing for a good billing assistant in a limited geographical area can be difficult. Luckily, medical coding and billing can be efficiently done remotely. Looking for a medical billing virtual assistant instead of a physical employee means you can have a better, wider pool of candidates.
Hiring a virtual assistant is more convenient for both your VA, who can work at the convenience of home without the need for daily commutes, and also for your medical office, which can now have access to a global pool and spend less on peripheral employee costs. With a VA, you won’t need to spend more for office space, office equipment, travel allowances, and other such expenses necessary to hire a physical employee.
What Tasks Can a Medical Billing Virtual Assistant Do For Me?
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Medical coding
A medical billing VA ensures that the proper service or procedure is encoded so that patients and/or insurers can be billed correctly.
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Checking insurance eligibility
A medical billing VA can nip issues in the bud from the onset. They can help the patients check their medical insurance coverage to see if all the services or procedures they need are eligible for insurance payment or reimbursement. This way, the clinic can reduce unexpected patient costs, which reduces the number of procedures left unpaid.
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Preparing and checking patient bills
A medical billing VA creates and reviews the bills you send your patients, and makes sure that it reflects all your patients’ most recent insurance coverage. This ensures accurate billing and can reduce patient anxiety because of wrong charges.
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Taking care of claims to insurers
Medical billing VAs handle everything about insurance claims, from double-checking medical codes for procedures, to creating, filing, and submitting claims. They also handle any re-filing and follow-ups, whenever necessary.
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Checking for payment discrepancies
Clean books are important for any business. Medical billing VAs can help you with this by combing through insurance companies’ and patients’ payments and making sure everything is in order.
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Appealing denied claims
It is unavoidable for some small discrepancies to appear every once in a while, or for insurance companies to disagree with a claim. In the cases that these happen, a medical billing VA can take care of appealing to the insurance companies for payment of services or procedures.
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Updating software for rate changes
A medical billing VA can help you keep your rate changes up to date both to the public and within your own billing and invoicing system. This ensures that the price paid for services rendered is accurate and fair for everyone.
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Creating or updating collection and cash flow reports
It’s important to keep track of cash and credit in order to maximize facility investment and still be comfortably afloat. A medical billing VA can help you monitor your clinic’s finances so you don’t find yourself financially unprepared.
What Skills and Qualifications Does a Medical Billing Virtual Assistant Need to Have?
- Familiar with different medical coding systems. Filling out invoices and claims often requires CPT or ICD-10 coding. It is very important that your medical billing virtual assistant is familiar with these systems in order to minimize complaints.
- Familiar with HIPAA compliance. Medical billing VAs are privy to a lot of confidential patient information. Therefore, they should be familiar with HIPAA so that they can maintain compliance to it, as required by law.
- Good communication skills. Medical billing VAs should be able to clearly and politely get their point across, in order to maintain good relationships with both patients and insurance companies.
- Meticulous and Organized. Medical billing VAs have to be accurate, patient and should be able to pay attention to detail, as they have to go through high volumes of paperwork within set timeframes.
- Ability to multitask. With so many important and detail-oriented tasks, it is a must for your Medical billing VA to be able to manage all these different kinds of duties efficiently and concurrently.
How Can I Hire a Medical Billing Virtual Assistant?
Hiring a medical billing virtual assistant can be very cost-efficient and rewarding for your business. However, it can be difficult to sit down and find the time to hire the best VA for your clinic. First, hiring in itself, whether for a VA or physical employee, is a time-consuming task. Second, the opportunities afforded by getting a VA — a global talent pool, the right expertise, and the best schedule fit — also mean that you have to go through way more potential applicants than usual.
This is where companies like 20four7VA can help your business. Virtual assistant staffing companies like 20four7VA scour the world for applicants for you, so you don’t have to do it all yourself. 20four7VA can help you identify your business requirements, screen your applicants, and even actively look for the best fit for your company. They can make shortlist the candidates to only the most qualified, and even do initial culture fit judgments. All you have to do is take a look at the candidates 20four7VA handpicks, and interview from that list to choose the best fit for your business.
If you want to start on your road to getting a medical billing VA for your medical practice, all you have to do is book a no-obligation pre-consultation call with 20four7VA by clicking the button below.
