Integrating Medical Billing with EMR

Divan (Divyang) Da've CEO of ISM-OmniMD

January 1 2007, – Doctors work in a competitive and changing environment. Consumers are more demanding , regulations are more stringent, costs are rising and government is the other hand, increased use of IT tools has revolutionized the profession by enabling efficiency in the practice workflow. There remains the problem, however, of gaps between the medical practice, its back-end systems and the physicians.

The primary concerns for a medical practice are:

• Documentation
• Revenue
• Increasing Overhead

A medical billing service can be doctor’s key to getting paid. Although the medical profession is adopting various systems to streamline workflow, most doctors are still finding it difficult to get paid fairly and quickly.

In addition, insurance companies regularly change their medical review policies with respect to claim payments. Rejected claims due to non-compliance or submission errors result in a decrease in reimbursement and hence, revenue.

It is essential that the practice be well organizes and control its practice management processes efficiently to ensure profitability. It is important for the practice to recognize and address the various bottlenecks present in its workflow and information management.  it is necessary to streamline workflow and documentation, improve communication and reduce wasted time and resources associates with patient visits.

Integrating Medical billing with EMR

With the increasing  acceptance of EMR by physicians,  It is essential they adopt a system that automates the entire billing process starting from point-of-care through reimbursement by the payer. Information technology has provided the tools required to efficiently manage a practice.

To date, there is a tendency to have multiple systems carry out the different operations of a practice – EMR for clinical documentation. Practice Management for billing and financial administration, document management for patient reports,  appointment  scheduler for appointments and so on.

Therefore, integration of such islands of data essential to get he maximum benefit of technology. This will ultimately increase the efficiency of the billing process, leading to an increase in cash flow by creating an end-to-end solution that lies together the entire physicians office from scheduling to treatment and finally, to billing.

Advantages of integration

Easy to use and Easy to Manage

Once a patient record is entered in the EMR, The information is automatically shared with the billing system. Redundant entries are automatically eliminates because access to all patients’ demographic and insurance information is quickly distributed from one central point to other modules. Procedure codes,  diagnosis  codes and other information added just once during treatment are made available for billing. Super bills with procedure and diagnostic codes are transferred to the billing system and can be used to generate and send claims.

Improve Cash Flow and collections

Physicians can quickly and easily select the proper procedures and diagnoses and create electronic super bills right at the point-of-care. While capturing the charge, the software checks the accuracy of the CPT and ICD-9 codes to