How To Improve Medical Coding Quality

medical coding tips

If you notice reduced coding quality on one of your department’s ends and incomplete or untimely reimbursements, there is a possibility of repercussions for your medical organization. In most cases, this results in a loss of revenue. For efficient revenue cycle management, it is imperative to train your employees to execute quality coding by utilizing available technology and staying updated.

Regardless of whether you run a small clinic or a huge healthcare facility, regular analysis of your coding department along with the implementation of the following medical coding tips will certainly boost your coding operations and speed up the revenue cycle.

Consequences of Low-Quality Coding

To avoid your medical practice from being a target for intense scrutiny by the agencies that are responsible for analyzing and evaluating medical fraud at medical practices, it is important to adopt accurate and high-quality coding. Failure to do so might cause your healthcare practice to face sanctions and other punitive damages.

Inaccurate coding practice makes it likely for the coding team to be held responsible for falsifying claims. This commonly results in a vast decrease in your firm’s monetary gain. If this sort of medical abuse is ongoing at your practice and there is consistent evidence of falsifying claims or incorrect coding over a long period, your practice is very likely to be held liable for medical fraud.

In such large-scale corporations, it is impossible to prioritize intent over actions. If you send incorrect submission claims to the insurance agencies or government organizations, such as Medicare, for reimbursements, your mistake can cost you the future of your medical practice.

As terrifying as it is to be charged with falsification of claims and hefty fines, the most common consequence of low coding quality is less scary. Neglect in adopting medical coding tips and implementing them in your coding routine is likely to have insurance companies reject your submission for claims reimbursement. Incomplete or no reimbursements bring about a downgrade in revenue and your medical practice may cause significant financial loss, which may never be reimbursed.

coding quality

Medical Coding Tips to Improve Revenue

One of the core challenges that medical corporations face regularly is dealing with decreased medical coding quality and medical coding errors. During the global pandemic, the coding departments all around the world suffered greatly due to the lack of communication in remote work. In the section below, we have provided a detailed guide to a few of the possible medical coding tips that can be implemented at your healthcare facility to generate better revenue.

Focus

For any person to focus on their work, their work must go uninterrupted or undisturbed. Statistics show that for an average person who is interrupted working on a specific task with a deep level of concentration, it takes around 23 minutes for them to go back to the work with the same level of concentration. Even in general cases, such as children studying, once the work/study pattern is interrupted, it takes a while to regain the temperament.

Employees should be strictly advised to turn off their phone notifications during the time they are at work to minimize distractions. This effectively directs most of their concentration on accurate and high-quality coding.

Hiring a Coding Team

If you are well established in the world of healthcare, you may consider hiring a team solely dedicated to coding work. An outsourced team that is essentially qualified for coding could better handle the specific documentation required to improve the coding at a healthcare facility.

An alternate to this medical coding tip is training your staff regarding electronic medical records or EMR practices. This way you can train a handful of your employees and designate them to the coding department. A thorough understanding of medical coding and the medical coding tips required to boost revenue across the providers, support staff, coders, and revenue cycle specialists drastically decreases errors in coding and improves coding quality.

Limiting The Coder’s Tasks

The coders need to be assigned coding tasks. Any tasks outside the scope of a learned coder would overshadow their skills and not allow them to work on coding at their full potential. Overwhelming amounts of tasks, especially non-coding tasks, are bound to be tiring and the coders may not be able to deliver quality coding.

Establishing Effective Communication

Establishing an effective communication system between the provider and coding team ensures prompt and proper documentation of medical procedures. Communication qualifies as a medical coding tip as it allows the staff to not miss out on any procedural actions and modify the workflow to result in quality coding. Amid the release of numerous coding updates, a healthy and practical communication bridge should be established between the staff and the coding team.

Effective communication helps in coding compliance and staying up-to-date with the changed coding guidelines for all payments. Accurate coding of the said procedures saves up a lot of time amongst the hospital itself and the insurance companies associated with it during reimbursements.

quality coding

Using Technology

In today’s world, a great medical coding tip is to utilize various computer programs available for this purpose. These not only can effectively analyze healthcare documents, but also identify appropriate medical coding for a specific concern. This fairly reduces any room for errors, which may occur if coding were not digitalized. Computer assisting coding (CAC) software is a great option if you are looking to eliminate extra paperwork, speed up the coding process, and get greater coder satisfaction. Additionally, utilizing technology in the coding department is likely to boost your coder’s productivity and hence, increase revenue.

Performing Audits

The practice of performing audits is mainly for medical services that prefer quality over productivity and every medical platform prefers that. A coding compliance audit establishes a process that brings forward errors or coding inaccuracies. These can be addressed promptly, which without audit compliance, would generally be missed in final coding submissions. Performing audits might slow down your coding process but the speed would naturally have no merit if your codes were full of inaccuracies.

Explain to your coding department how their final goal of adopting all these medical coding tips and strategies is a sign of incoming and continuous professional growth, which is likely to have a largely positive impact on your revenue cycle.

Staying Up-To-Date On the Changes In Healthcare

Updates in ICD-10, HCPCS (health common procedure coding system), and CPT occur on an annual basis. Keeping track of every development in the world of coding, as slight as it may be, is imperative for accurate coding and billing. If your team or coding department fails to stay on top of every update in the coding guidelines or procedures, chances are you may risk losing scores for reimbursements. The cost of patient care is likely to get a feasible result following a deep understanding and implementation of new reporting guidelines and value-based care.

See Also: Everything You Need To Know About Urgent Care Coding Updates In 2022

Conclusion

To ensure high-quality coding, you must work to promote audit quality, and medical credentials, and provide sufficient training to your coding team. Precision Hub, along with the above-mentioned medical coding tips, offers you the best medical coding and billing services to improve the standards of patient care and increase revenue.