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The financial health of your organization is paramount, as it allows you to continue to offer quality services to your clients and an appropriate salary to your hardworking staff. Billing audits can ensure that you are being paid what you are owed by uncovering services that were not billed for in part or full. Billing audits also allow you to see situations costing your treatment center money. However, this insightful process can be complicated without the right tools.
A Fully Integrated System
Having client payments and insurance payments in separate places can complicate and slow down the process of determining whether you have been fully reimbursed for the services you have provided to clients. Different systems for your EMR (Electronic Medical Records) and RCM (Revenue Cycle Management) can also mean tracking down specific services rendered and referencing payment records to ascertain whether all charges are accounted for. It is far too easy for things to slip through the cracks when you rely on separate systems to get the whole picture.
This is why your RCM needs an EMR built into it. Lightning Step Technologies does just that with our All-In-One system. We can provide your company with a fully integrated EMR and RCM solution that also incorporates a robust CRM (Customer Relation Management). A single login and a single price will be all you need to store and track data across all your departments.
Our “lightning threading” technology also allows information entered at one point in the system to automatically be distributed throughout the rest of the system. Rather than being a hassle that your staff dreads each time, billing audits are made easy with Lightning Step.
Catch Mistakes Early
During a billing audit, you ideally want to discover any services not associated with a correct charge. This could mean that a service was never billed for, or it was not billed for in its entirety. These are easy to miss, especially with the increasing number of clients in your organization and the variety of treatments you offer.
When something is easy to miss, you will want to remove barriers that make your job harder, such as requiring your billing department to manually review the information and copy it by hand. Manual entry can be a recipe for human error, which ultimately means more distance is put between you and the reimbursement you earned and that you need to keep your company afloat.
Lightning Step can help you catch these mistakes early and even prevent them in some cases. Since our RCM is fully integrated with the EMR, attendance records updated by clinical staff will then automatically create and distribute charges to a patient portal, where clients and families can submit payments directly. There is no need for billing staff to request attendance records and painstakingly review them before billing clients appropriately.
Automatic billing for services like outpatient sessions can ensure that those charges are not being missed and free up your staff to focus on more complicated matters that require more attention. Additionally, Lightning Step can flag billing and insurance discrepancies, making it clear what needs more attention rather than trawling through endless data entries to find issues.
Follow the Paper Trail
A billing audit does its job if it uncovers some services that have not been billed for correctly. When this inevitably happens, it is helpful to have a paper trail to follow to fill in the blanks and remedy the situation. Often, that paper trail is spread out over multiple systems, zig-zagging rather than offering you a clear path to the information you need. Sometimes, the paper trail can even lead you to physical papers in a filing cabinet.
Lightning Step can make billing audits easy on your organization by keeping everything all in one place. Information about treatments, medication management, assessments, labs, and attendance are housed in the same system that controls billing. Each charge has a history behind it rather than being disjointed. Being able to conduct your audit with all the necessary information only a few mouse clicks away can save time and frustration and more quickly address gaps in payment.
The Big and Small Picture
An audit is about the nitty-gritty details and ensuring everything is accounted for, but it can also be a helpful tool in assessing your organization’s overall financial health. When the small details consume your staff’s time because of inefficient processes, it can be hard to get that big picture. Freeing them up with Lightning Step’s integrated system can help you get the most out of your billing audits with the least time, allowing you to focus on the possibilities of the future rather than painstakingly remedying the mistakes of the past.
An easy billing audit process can significantly affect your organization’s finances. Removing time-consuming barriers like housing information across different systems and leaving all charges to be entered manually can free up your billing staff to do their jobs more efficiently. Lightning Step Technologies has designed an All-In-One system to eliminate those barriers. Our product combines a CRM, EMR, and RCM with one clean interface and a single login. Some charges can be billed automatically based on attendance. Clients and families can access charges through a patient portal, meaning that payments are made without requiring your staff to take care of them directly. Our fully integrated system is efficient, safe, and easy to learn. The less time and attention you give to these tasks, the more attention you can spend on clients, and Lightning Step gives you both. To learn more about our All-In-One system, schedule a demo today.
