WHAT IS MEDICAL BILLING?

By now you have a good idea about the practice of medical coding. But we still don’t know much about what those codes are used for.

While it’s true that we can use diagnosis and procedure codes to track the spread of disease or the effectiveness of a particular procedure, their main use in the United States is in the reimbursement process. In other words, codes help us bill accurately and efficiently.

Let’s take a closer look at why we bill.

WHY WE BILLGoing to the doctor may seem like a one-to-one interaction, but in reality it’s part of a large, complex system of information and payment. While the insured patient may only have direct interaction with one person or healthcare provider, that check-up is actually part of a three-party system.

The first party is the patient. The second party is the healthcare provider. The term ‘provider’ includes hospital, physicians, physical therapists, emergency rooms, outpatient facilities, and any other place where medical services are performed. The third and final party is the insurance company, or payer.

It’s the medical biller’s job to negotiate and arrange for payment between these three parties. Specifically, the biller ensures that the healthcare provider is compensated for their services by billing both patients and payers. We bill because healthcare providers need to be compensated for the services they perform.

In order to do this, the biller collects all of the information (found in a “superbill”) about the patient and the patient’s procedure, and compiles that into a bill for the insurance company. This bill is called a claim, and it contains a patient’s demographic information, medical history, and insurance coverage, in addition to a report on what procedures were performed and why. Read more @ https://tinyurl.com/2p99buxw