Billing Services

Many home care agencies have turned to BKD National Health Care Group for billing and accounts receivable recovery services. Our home care consultants can help you get back on track and work to improve your cash flow and billing operations.

Inexperienced or improperly trained billing personnel can unwittingly create cash-flow difficulties for your agency through inappropriately suspended, paid or denied claims. Your agency also may face fraud and abuse issues if billing personnel do not understand Medicare complexities and their impact on the billing process. Too often, the mentality is “as long as the claim was paid, I must have billed it okay.”

Today’s increased federal scrutiny of home care billing practices has made this behavior even more unwise. Ignorance of the law is no protection against civil, criminal and administrative penalties.

BKD National Health Care Group consultants can bill your agency’s home health and hospice Medicare, Medicaid, commercial insurance and private-pay services to the appropriate payers, including insurance co-pay and deductible amounts and individual patients. We also can review supporting documentation and make recommendations to improve your regulatory compliance.

Our expertise allows us to complete the billing process for your agency quickly, which can increase cash flow through fewer suspended claims and faster claims payment. We can maintain the accounts receivable data for each patient and provide you with accurate and current financial logs and agings. Our reports can offer expected dollars and dollars received period to date.

Turnover in your business office, lack of proper training and failure of business office personnel to follow up on unpaid claims can quickly result in a backlog of outstanding claims. Too often, home care billing personnel do not have the time or the expertise to research and resolve claim problems. Timely filing limitations can turn your unpaid claims into write-offs.

BKD National Health Care Group consultants can help your agency get back on track by helping you:

• Identify outstanding claims
• Resolve nonpayment issues
• Train billing staff to prevent future accounts receivable problems

Since Medicare home health became subject to the prospective payment system, your agency may have unknowingly lost thousands in episode payments due to billing errors and inappropriate payment adjustments. Common errors include incorrect billing of significant change in condition payment adjustments and episodes inappropriately downcoded for low therapy utilization.

With many layers of complexity in the billing process, even a small number of billing errors can result in significant payment losses. BKD National Health Care Group can help your agency recover lost payments through the following services:

• Identifying incorrectly paid episodes
• Assisting your staff in correcting payment errors
• Training your billing and clinical staff to prevent future payment errors

Billing Operations Enhancement
Review of billing process to improve cash-flow efficiency and assess state and federal regulatory compliance

Billing Compliance Audits
Identify risk areas in your billing office and clinical records and recommend improvements

Billing Training
Tailored training for billing personnel on basic and advanced billing issues