Based on the experience of Cardiology Billing Partners there are four key elements to creating a world-class billing staff:

• Recruit, train and retain the best billing staff:
• The leading billing organizations recruit best staff.  A dedicated, specialized HR team evaluates applicants—applicants must pass a proprietary billing testing process assessing both skill and will. This process shouldn’t be different from the recruiting process of a Fortune 500 organization.
• The leading billing organizations train to develop desired quality.  Junior staff members must pass demanding training programs—junior team members are developed into billers, capable of following the measured and monitored billing process.  In addition, staff is trained throughout the year in latest payer rules, follow-up techniques and compliance guidelines.  A dedicated Compliance Officer is responsible for all additional HIPAA and OIG training.
• Best staff is retained; weak staff released.  The billing organizations staff is evaluated every year to assure proper development and progress.  Evaluations are based on tangible, measurable targets and quality indicators. Best performers are properly rewarded and lowest 10% of performers are asked to leave. This should be done methodically in an effort to continuously improved the quality of billing staff.

• Specialization of the billing team: The top billing organizations’ billing team is composed of dedicated specialists in demographic data entry, charge posting, follow up, and patient collections.   Each position is designed to excel in its role and is properly supervised and incentivized.

• Provide the staff with solid analytics support;  Besides providing the clients with continuous practice analytics focused on clients’ practice improvements (coding, contracting, profitability, marketing, etc) , the leading billing organizations’ Analytics Group should offer strong analytics support to the billing staff. The Analytics Group should trend and measure payers response times, rejection trends, payment rates ,etc in order to properly focus the billing staff.  They should also measure various elements of the internal billing process for continuous improvements.

• Incentives for billing staff: All positions in billing process are monitored and incentivized to perform optimally for your account. The incentive system while highly motivating for the staff, falls within the parameters established by the OIG for an acceptable incentive system in a medical billing environment.  The best performers should be rewarded accordingly.

If you would like to learn more please visit Cardiology Billing Partners' website.