Medical coding is a complex aspect of the revenue cycle. Healthcare providers often struggle with managing practice operations and maintaining peak efficiency in the medical coding process. This is why providers are looking to outsource their medical coding process.
Outsourcing medical coding means leveraging the expertise of an external team to optimize your practice’s operations. Several companies also provide staff augmentation services that provide practices with a team of skilled, certified coders to help ramp up their coding process. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of leveraging a workforce extension of coders.
Benefits of Outsourcing Medical Coding
Increase in Revenue
The main aim of leveraging a workforce extension for coding is to increase revenue. This is done as the certified coders strive for coding accuracy and decrease claim denial rates. As claims get accepted at a much faster and better rate, the practice starts experiencing an increase in cash flow.
Access to Experienced Coders
Outsourcing medical coding opens doors to a pool of certified coders who bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise. The American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) is one organization that certifies these coders. These certifications are only granted after rigorous training and examinations. Thus, having access to these certified coders ensures higher accuracy and compliance in coding practices. Since these coders possess a deeper knowledge of coding terminologies, codes, guidelines, and regulatory requirements, it helps ensure the diagnostic procedures are accurately translated into codes. Thus, you have reduced errors, reduced claim denials, and accelerated cashflow.
Cost Effective
The healthcare industry is currently facing understaffing issues in almost all teams, whether coding and billing or clinical staff. Hiring employees is a whole process that takes a significant amount of time and even costs money. This is why staff augmentation is a great solution to this issue. Opting for staff augmentation helps ensure you save on labor costs while gaining access to highly skilled and experienced staff.
Enhanced patient care
With ever-changing regulations, demanding paperwork, and extensive coding, providers have little time for patient care. This is why patient outcomes suffer. Leveraging a team of certified coders helps remove the worry from medical coding so that providers can focus on patient care. With the best medical coding company working on medical coding, coding quality improves, which results in increased reimbursements.
Compliance with Regulations
Medical coding requires strict compliance with regulations. With the ever-changing regulations, keeping up with the updates gets exhausting. It takes away time from patient care and results in incorrect coding. Coders provided in staff augmentation services are certified and highly knowledgeable in medical coding, which results in accurate coding and fewer denials. These coders ensure procedures and treatments are correctly translated to code, documentation is complete, and the correct modifiers are used. A physician who is required to spend hours on patient care cannot have this level of expertise in medical coding, and honest mistakes can occur.
Scalability
If your practice has an in-house medical coding team, you may face challenges scaling this team when your practice demands growth. Hiring employees can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, and you will not be guaranteed to come across valuable resources. When you leverage staff augmentation services for coding, you gain access to a team of certified medical coders with in-depth knowledge of medical coding, its regulations, and terminologies. The team knows how to handle different situations and optimize your coding process. This is especially helpful when you need to scale your team for a season without worrying about hiring costs. With staff augmentation, you can scale your team up or down as needed.
Security
Security is of the utmost importance in healthcare. When it comes to medical billing and coding, organizations often look for solutions that offer a secure platform with HIPAA compliance and disaster recovery measures to prevent data loss or cyberattacks. A staff augmentation service provider helps ensure their team follows HIPAA regulations and protects data while elevating your coding operations.
Transparency
When outsourcing processes as crucial as medical billing or coding, it is natural to worry about trusting an external team with your data. Workforce extension services provide providers with full transparency into their operations, so they have no doubts about the safety of the processes. The coding team offers you coding reports and records throughout the entire cycle so that you can gain insight into how the entire cycle is running.
Conclusion
If your practice is suffering from claim denials due to incorrect coding, under-coding, or over-coding, it is time for you to consider staff augmentation for coding. With unparalleled expertise without the commitment of hiring, you hit the jackpot with a team of certified professionals at your disposal.
CareCloud is a leading provider of staff augmentation for medical coders. With over 20 years of experience providing healthcare technology solutions, it provides workforce extension services for your coding processes. With CareCloud Force, you can ensure faster reimbursements and reduced denials.
