4 Habits of Highly Effective Hospital Staff
Building good habits among hospital staff is the key to ensuring everything runs smoothly. The staff is the foundation of any hospital. When everything professionally flows it reflects well not only on employees but also on the hospital’s patients and their families.
The Importance of Immediately Checking All Payment Options
When a patient is first admitted, it is the hospital staff’s duty to check all payment options. A hospital billing specialist must be able to handle the following effectively and efficiently
- Patient’s Payment Responsibility: From the gate, the medical billing specialist should immediately grasp the individual’s responsibility for payment. All patient responsibility levels differ but with enough experience and skill, a trained medical specialist will quickly be able to decipher the situation.
- Insurance Coverage Analysis: A medical billing specialist will evaluate and analyze the patient’s insurance cover and all relative medical charges. This will help the hospital staff prepare accurate billing forms that are easy to understand.
- Collecting Owed Revenue: The job of the hospital’s billing specialist includes collecting accurate payments form the insurance plans and also the patients. If the patient cannot readily pay their balance then an acceptable payment plan must be devised the benefits not only the hospital but also the patient.
Patient Information Must be Filled Out Right the First Time
Simply handing a patient a form and expecting them to fill it out without going over all aspects is a lax behavior on the part of the hospital admittance staff. Ideally, a hospital staff member should sit with the person and go over all parts of the admittance and insurance information paperwork to make sure that everything is satisfactorily filled out. Any gaps or empty questions can make billing and the collection of revenue at a later date difficult and time-consuming. It is better to correctly fill out everything the first time. Valuable time and resources are often wasted trying to gather information that should have initially been entered at admittance. Plus, a hospital will suffer from payment delays if all information is not correct on the forms.
Always Ask the Correct Questions at Registration
Ideally, all hospital registration staff needs to be trained in exactly what questions to ask the patient at the time of registration. If all questions are asked and recorded then the entire process of billing will go much easier than if the registration staff member fails to ask the appropriate question.
Billing Mistakes Happen but Steps Should be Taken to Fix Them
It is often hard for a hospital staff member to acknowledge when they have made a mistake and then take the steps to fix it. Many will simply shuffle the problem away or try to sidestep it. This can ultimately cost time and revenue. Mistakes happen and they should be dealt with promptly by the hospital staff so the entire billing process does not stall.
The professionals at the Midland Group know exactly how important it is to work on building good habits among hospital staff so that everything functions correctly and the hospital gains the maximum about of revenue.
