|
Sixteen payers, six hundred clients, sixteen thousand claims. Welcome to Clinic billing. When we rolled out the new BillingBuilder in 2008, one of the first agencies to begin using it provides much more than outpatient mental health services. A fixture of New York’s Lower East Side for over 100 years, the agency has services for everyone in the community from toddlers to senior citizens. But their clinic was in need of a billing program that would streamline their process, reduce human error, and increase their revenue.
Nobody thought it would be an easy task to make the transition from one billing system to another, especially because the AWARDS BillingBuilder is a configurable system. That means that the agency is responsible for the billing rules, codes, and rates. For an agency that has been using an outside billing service, this is no small order.
Theirs is a tale of bravery, cunning, and most of all, persistence. The heroes are their Director of Quality Improvement & Compliance and a newly-appointed AWARDS Administrator & Billing Coordinator. We worked together to puzzle through the various requirements of each insurance company, submitting claims and analyzing errors. Along the way, we added configuration options to the BillingBuilder and spent hours discussing how each procedure could be configured both for accurate billing and clarity on the program side. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t cry. More than once. But today they are billing and they are getting paid. Perhaps best of all, they are confident that their billable services are backed up by the right documentation and they have the in-house knowledge to be in control of the whole process.
Juliette Palmer
Senior Project Manager
|
