There’s no doubt that revenue cycle mismanagement can cause serious damage to long-term healthcare system performance. The most direct result being the waste of valuable money and resources. Other causes of overstretched revenue management resources have on your bottom line include poor reputation among suppliers, employees and patients.

Shrinking personnel within a billing office staff for reasons such as retirement, vacation or other leaves of absence can have a negative effect on operational and financial operations and lead to costly errors and poor time management of current resources.

Remote Coder Solutions

Many hospital systems have turned to remote coding professionals to supplement overstretched revenue cycle management resources. They find that a credentialed coder can quickly resolve a high percentage of claims because they have access to facility records via VPN. Claims are resolved the same day and returned for billing. The hospital has captured the following benefits as a result of this protocol:

• Claims are turned around for billing immediately instead of enduring a routing process in the hospital. The hospital gets paid faster.

• There is little or no allocation of hospital based coder time to respond to billing requests. Vacancy, vacations, volume swings and other factors driving the availability of hospital based coders to work on claim requests are no longer a problem for billing.

• It is a cost effective way to access professional coding time. As volumes fluctuate from day to day, utilization of the remote coder time fluctuates proportionately.

Remote coders can focus on identification of patterns and recommend solutions easily because they are focused only on claims that have been rejected. They might recommend charge master updates, new coding practices, physician education and/or many other ideas.

Nearterm helps healthcare organizations meet their coding and coding audit needs as part of our overall 360 RCM Managed Services. Our national client base includes hospitals, clinics and other provider types that need coders and auditors who are credentialed, certified, vetted, professionally managed, and located in the United States. Nearterm coders are held to productivity and accuracy metrics that exceed industry standards.

In addition to the medical coding services, Nearterm also provides leadership, implementation support and project management services for all RCM activities and projects. We offer a comprehensive 360 solution from patient access to accounts receivable resolution. Nearterm resources can work from remote locations and/or onsite, whatever your organization requires of them. Contact us for a consultation and quote to solve your remote coding backlog issues.