The front desk is one of the most critical roles in your medical practice. The front desk staff is the “face” of your practice, and the greeters are responsible for making patients feel welcome. They also play a massive part in helping patients better understand their plans and enhance processes that can help you reduce your denials and improve how you collect your payments.
In the second installment of our Best Practices webinar series, Caroline Balestra, a business process analyst at Health Prime, advised improving your front desk processes to help manage your medical practice smoothly.
Be Organized
Schedule effectively
Patients should be scheduled in a manner that promotes sufficient provider time for each visit and guarantees short waiting times. Long waits and limited access to care can put your practice in jeopardy. Eventually, patients can tend to seek care elsewhere.
Insurance Verification & Authorization
The next step your front desk needs to take is verifying insurance benefits and eligibility. This process can include obtaining prior authorization in some situations. Recent data shows that while 79% of practices verified insurance information at the initial visit, only 25% verified coverage on subsequent or follow-up visits.
“Verification on subsequent visits is crucial for reducing the amount of work on the back end. Front-end verification can reduce claim issues related to eligibility and benefits, which reduces the chance of rejections and denials, causing faster reimbursement turnaround times for insurance claims,” -Balestra explained.
Verification
Front office staff must ask multiple questions to ensure they have verified the patient’s insurance and that it’s accurate and current. Run system eligibility checks to validate insurance information you have entered in your system, either for a single patient or the entire schedule.
Make sure you have a standardized verification form that all staff can use with each patient, depending on the services the physicians typically offer. Ensure that the questions to be asked of the payer include everything you need to obtain all the information on the first attempt. Have a copy of this form uploaded to the patient’s chart so you have reference information in case your billing team needs it to support a claim.
The success or failure of each patient claim begins and ends in the front office. Patient insurance eligibility verification is the first—and perhaps most critical—step in the billing process. That means your front office must be on point when obtaining and accurately recording all this information.
Authorization
Why do you need to get an Authorization for services that require it?
- Keep costs in check.
- Ensure medical necessity.
- Reduce duplicated services.
Without authorization, the insurance payer is free to refuse a patient’s medical service payment as part of the health care insurance plan. “For any service that requires authorization, if you do not obtain one, your claim will definitely be denied and likely never paid,” Balestra explained.
Prior authorization requirements can sometimes lead to delays or denials of care. These roadblocks frustrate and worry doctors, hospitals, and patients while adding to the mountain of paperwork they must complete.
Check-In & Check-Out Tips
For the check-in process:
- Manage phone interruptions: Have exclusive staff answer incoming calls, answer billing inquiries, and schedule calls. By removing the distraction of answering the phone, your front desk staff can focus on greeting, reviewing paperwork, updating demographics, scanning copies of cards, and collecting payments.
- Smile while collecting payment: Staff should greet every patient with empathy and a smile while remaining firm about collecting expected payments. Confidence in collections is vital for this role.
- Scan new cards to the system: Have patients sign a financial policy before receiving services. Review the intake paperwork and financial agreement with patients at their first appointment. Make sure they understand the details and allow them to ask questions. If they question your request for payment, refer them back to the policy they signed and agreed to.
There are some strategies you can follow to help you with this task:
Make sure to make the check-out process as quick and effortless as possible. Timing is essential: collect any remaining information, schedule the subsequent visits, coordinate referrals, and follow-up care. Also, be prepared, compassionate, and firm with the patients. Don’t forget to ensure excellent communication between the front and back office (or billers).
Patient Feedback
Each patient who comes into the practice is a potential critic who can provide invaluable feedback. This plays a huge role in quality improvement and professional development. Measure your patients’ satisfaction through different methods, such as online surveys, informal feedback, or voluntary events.
Once you have measured patient satisfaction, know and outline the mission at hand by breaking it down into long and short-term goals. Meet with your team to get ideas for making the patients’ experience more enjoyable. Offer value-based services to improve your customer service. Also, sharing your knowledge can be a great way to give your patients some value. Think of providing a community forum or workshop on your website to provide helpful tools.
Remember to follow-up on your patients’ feedback to ensure they feel heard. Be sure to follow through with any changes. Remember to reward your staff for the amazing customer service they provide for your patients.
At Health Prime, we can Help!
Virtual Office – Prime Solutions
If you are a Health Prime client interested in these services, contact your Client Success Consultant to see how we can help your front desk. If you are not a client yet, contact us at [email protected] for more information on how we can help you improve your front desk processes and implement some of these best practices.
Subscribe to our Health Prime blog to stay tuned for the upcoming installments of our Best Practices webinar and all the latest updates on running your medical practice better so you can focus on what matters most: your patients.
