Today we are going to play Unpleasant Truth Time. All those rules that you painstakingly memorized to get your claims out of the door are just the beginning. Insurance companies have more reasons to deny your claims then I could even begin to list here, and the biggest and most time consuming part of your job will be to unravel those reasons and get your doctor her money. This post will help you to do that. Email me at newgenerationbilling.com for the Cliff Notes version of this post.
There are two kinds of follow up–loose paper follow up and insurance aging follow up. Your loose papers are denials, partial payments, and requests for information from the insurance companies. Even with a healthy account you are going to have your share of these.
When you have denied and partially paid charges, here are your options to get them paid:
1. Resubmission
2. Reprocessing
3. Appealing to the insurance company
4. Appealing to the insurance commissioner
When you resubmit a claim it is usually to correct an error. When I get a denial from an insurance company, the first thing I do is to make sure that I billed everything correctly, even though I have been doing this for over a decade now. And I make sure to check EVERYTHING. I review the diagnosis, service, date, doctor, facility, insurance, and id#, because these are all things I have messed up on in the past. Just a quick aside for those of you who are planning on calling us for billing or consulting services, please be assured, those mistakes are very rare. If I was the kind of person to use a smiley face in my professional blog, I would put one here.
When you do make a mistake all you have to do is correct the claim and mark in box 19 that this is a corrected claim and indicate what you fixed. Here is an example. Say you billed a DX of 627.9 (postmenopausal syndrome) to a Mr. Henry Winkler. Now, Mister Henry Winkler is not going to have postmenopausal syndrome because he is a man. You pull up the superbill and realize that you meant to bill 682.9 (cellulitis). Change your ICD9 code, in box 19 write “Corrected claim, Corrected ICD9 code”, and resubmit your claim.
Most of the denials you receive, however, will not be your fault. This is where you would call the insurance and have them reprocess the claim. Insurance companies process claims wrong all the time. Several times I have even had my claims denied as duplicates to themselves! If the claim was denied due to an error on the part of the insurance, usually all we have to do is call them and get them to send the claim back for reprocessing. Make sure you have the following information available when you call because it will save you a great deal of stress:
1. Your provider’s NPI and Tax ID. They don’t always ask for both of these, but having them in front of you when you do your follow up will save you time with those representatives that do want both numbers.
2. The patient’s ID number, name, and date of birth. They always ask for all three of these things. When you’re on the phone with an insurance company, the rep won’t hurry you, or tell you that you’re wasting her time, or ask you to hang up and call back once you have the information. But if you are scrambling around for it, you are wasting your own time.
3. The date of the charge you are calling in regards to, and total billed amount of the charge. The insurance is going to have a lot of claims on file, so they are going to need the amount of your claim to make sure the two of you are talking about the same thing.
When you request that a claim be reprocessed, please don’t take no for an answer. If the claims representative won’t help you, go up to a supervisor. Hang up and call again. Since you’ve already checked your claim top to bottom, you know that the error was not on your side and you should not have to take any more of your time to resolve this issue.
You will run across things that a phone call cannot resolve. In those cases, we send in written appeals. With my appeals I send a copy of the claim, any documentation I have to support my position, and a letter. In my letter I explain exactly what my objection is, what documentation I am attaching, and what result I expect to see. Here is a sample Appeal letter for something like a timely filing. I keep templates of my letters on file for the most common denials: timeliness, medical necessity, incorrect duplicate denials. If you want, I can post samples of those as well, just email or comment and I’ll put them up.
Now, no matter how exactly worded your letter, and no matter how thorough your documentation, sometimes your appeals will be denied. Your last resort is to go to the insurance commissioner. You can see your options on the state website http://www.insurance.ca.gov/ and there are step by step instructions on how to file your complaint.
Once all the loose papers on your desk have been taken care of, it is vital that you pull an aging report. The claims that get denied and partially paid are the claims the insurance receives. If you read the appeal letter, you probably realize that many of the outstanding claims you have on your accounts receivable right now are claims that the insurance has “never received.” The insurance will never send you a zero dollar EOB or a request for information, and your time limit to file and to appeal will run out before you realize.
Doctors, office managers, billers, please remember to pull your aging on a monthly basis. Not only will you catch the follow up that you would not otherwise find, you can make sure that your aging is healthy. A healthy aging will have at least 80% of your outstanding balances within 60 days. We have customers with 90% of the charges outstanding within 60 days.
If you pull your aging and you don’t like what you see, that is where New Generation comes in. Call us at (909) 374-5439 or email us at newgenerationbilling.com. You have plenty of options, call us and find out what the are.
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