What to look for in a lab billing company

As a medical professional, you’re under intense pressure to do the right thing every day. Being able to accurately diagnose and treat conditions is crucial to your reputation.

Those stakes are heightened even more when you are part of a medical lab. Accurately examining every sample that comes into your lab is imperative. And while accuracy is vital even on the most mundane days, that takes on exceptional importance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only do your tests need to be accurate, but they also require a quick turn around.

A medical lab sees more samples during a typical day than any private practice. While a hospital lab only accounts for maybe five percent of total revenue, the findings that a lab discovers make up a large percentage of a patient’s electronic health record. Lab tests can determine the severity of a particular ailment. They also lay the foundation for an individualized treatment protocol. And given all the responsibilities and pressure that come with working in a lab, the ability to outsource the billing and revenue process is important. After all, you want your lab to focus on diagnosing and treating patients, not worrying about billing.

Advantages of outsourcing the billing

Instead of handling billing on your own, why not consider outsourcing your needs to a trusted medical biller, like us? Laboratory medical billing needs to be built around the different circumstances that come with a medical lab instead of a hospital visit because all the considerations that come with lab billing require complex attention.

Having a customized billing software system allows lab owners to make sure revenue is generated faster than normal systems. Using custom-for-you scheduling allows your team to make sure that patients have their insurance eligibility approved before any testing is conducted and that allows a lab to avoid surprises. And like any of our revenue cycle billing systems, you can view claims in real time in case they’re edited and resubmitted, keeping your operation profitable.

The advantage of using the lab billing software option from Med USA includes being able to see payments in real-time. It also allows you to take a deep dive into your analytics. This information helps pinpoint the parts of your business that generate the most revenue, as well as those offerings that are a drag on efficiency. When you have this information, you can make adjustments that benefit your bottom line. In fact, our software bills an average of 98% of claims within 24 hours and closes 94% of charts within the same day.

What a lab billing system brings

The ability to have reports generated in the system makes data analysis and the monitoring of performance indicators easy. It allows for a single-solution presentation for your lab’s data and integrates with other systems to create a seamless experience in a broader hospital system.

A billing system provides two main variables that a lab needs to focus on: the billing software and the services that it entails. The software can make the revenue cycle management process efficient. Managing your own software is also much easier for labs that are part of a broader system that has its own IT department.

Lab billing contracted through Med USA means that your business gets increased efficiency by moving all of your billing needs to our in-house firm. Ultimately, this can provide you with as much as a 30% opportunity for revenue growth.

Analytics through billing

Using a lab billing company allows you to generate revenue reports that provide an in-depth analysis of where your revenue comes from. That type of information can then be utilized to see if there are parts of your lab department that can be expanded to then grow the revenue further.

You can also see what the accounts receivable time is for the billing department and how to adjust the AR time to increase the revenue generated in certain periods. Considering a lab’s overhead and accession, analytics can determine the profitability of procedures and payer relationships. Using similar projections to gauge the profitability of opportunities moving forward can be educational for a lab in determining its best revenue-generating path forward.

With more than four decades of building profitable relationships, Med USA is a medical billing and practice management company that provides customized solutions including an integrated electronic health record (EHR) system, medical coding and credentialing services. We provide scalable solutions for all types of providers, from small practices to large healthcare systems. Find out more about our lab billing solutions today.