As the government and insurance companies continue to make their way to the healthcare industry, the chances of errors at medical practices are growing rapidly. To curb costs, medical practice managers are growing distant from medical coding professionals—but is it really worth it?

The first step towards generating revenue for your medical practice is streamlining your medical billing procedure.

Making errors here could mean jeopardizing your practice and considerably affecting its overall performance.

Here are a few medical billing errors you should always watch out for:

Duplicate Billing

Duplicate billing remains to be one of the most common errors at medical practices. It occurs when one service is billed more than once.

For example, a nurse and doctor both could have indicated that a particular medicine was given to patient without knowing that it had already been billed. It is quite possible that a medication was billed both when being administered and when being prescribed.

Failing to Verify a Patient’s Coverage

With the highly competitive insurance marketplace patient coverage can change at any point in time. It is your responsibility to verify their coverage to avoid billing complications later.

Upcoding

Upcoding refers to instances where medical practice owners enter codes into a patient’s bill for services they haven’t received. Even though it may be done by mistake some medical practice managers may also do this to inflate the total amount of the bill. Make sure you check the medical bills and verify them to avoid fines and legal consequences later.

Undercoding

Similarly, undercoding occurs when a medical practice manager or biller skips out some services and charges patients less. When done intentionally, this is typically to avoid audits or to minimize patient bills.

However, if done by mistake, it could still lead to legal consequences and penalties. Make sure you double-check all bills to avoid undercoding.

Sloppy Documentation

Let’s face it; as a medical practice owner and physician, you don’t have enough time on your hands to maintain clean records.

Apart from looking after patients, you may need to put in hours of extra time to sort out bills. If you do it yourself, you could easily be making the mistake of maintaining low quality records. This includes poor handwriting, paper records and even failure to record bills on time. All of these could dramatically impact your revenue.

Avoid all of these problems simply by hiring a Florida business solution provider like us. At A & B Business and Accounting Solutions, we offer a wide array of services including medical billing. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our services and how we can help you out.