Most people's New Year resolutions have been abandoned by the end of January. If you find your self in this group then take heart. You can still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. To do so, you must understand two basic principals of achieving your ambitions:
1. Treat your set backs as temporary failures and not total defeat (i.e., just because you broke down and smoked a cigarette does not mean you should just say I failed on my goal to quit smoking); and
2. Break your goal down into manageable pieces (i.e., I will lose 2 pounds in January; 2 lbs in February versus I will lose 25 pounds this year).
So, this is interesting, but how does it apply to medical billing? Well, if you keep these ideas in mind you can use them to achieve lofty improvements in medical billing performance. How? Start with a powerful and straight forward goal: Make sure your claims are clean before you submit them. This will help your medical billing in several ways:
- This goal forces you to concentrate on the most critical elements of medical billing - gathering the proper information and using it to create a clean claim;
- It allows you to focus on achievable, smaller goals (85% of claims go out clean in January, 87% go out clean in February, etc);
- This goal has many ways in which failure provides powerful learning opportunities. You can set aside time to analyze rejected claims to determine the source of the rejection and then focus on eliminating the problem area.
- It lends itself to technology aids. Invest in a scrubber that will help you find coding problems before you submit the claims. Invest in insurance verification tools that will make it easier to have clean demographics. Invest in coding tools that will help improve your data entry performance.
What does all of this mean? It means this is the time for a renewed focus on your medical billing business goals. It is time to:
- Understand where you are starting your journey (what portion of your claims are accepted on first submission);
- Write down a powerful and meaningful performance improvement goal (my practice will have over 95% of its claims accepted on the initial transmission);
- Create a "goal ladder" where each rung of the ladder represents an incremental, achievable goal on the way toward your ultimate goal. For instance your may set incremental goals of improving your clean claim performance by 1 percent each month; and
- Create a plan for how you will learn from rejected claims.
With this approach you can make 2009 your best medical billing year ever.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II
1. Treat your set backs as temporary failures and not total defeat (i.e., just because you broke down and smoked a cigarette does not mean you should just say I failed on my goal to quit smoking); and
2. Break your goal down into manageable pieces (i.e., I will lose 2 pounds in January; 2 lbs in February versus I will lose 25 pounds this year).
So, this is interesting, but how does it apply to medical billing? Well, if you keep these ideas in mind you can use them to achieve lofty improvements in medical billing performance. How? Start with a powerful and straight forward goal: Make sure your claims are clean before you submit them. This will help your medical billing in several ways:
- This goal forces you to concentrate on the most critical elements of medical billing - gathering the proper information and using it to create a clean claim;
- It allows you to focus on achievable, smaller goals (85% of claims go out clean in January, 87% go out clean in February, etc);
- This goal has many ways in which failure provides powerful learning opportunities. You can set aside time to analyze rejected claims to determine the source of the rejection and then focus on eliminating the problem area.
- It lends itself to technology aids. Invest in a scrubber that will help you find coding problems before you submit the claims. Invest in insurance verification tools that will make it easier to have clean demographics. Invest in coding tools that will help improve your data entry performance.
What does all of this mean? It means this is the time for a renewed focus on your medical billing business goals. It is time to:
- Understand where you are starting your journey (what portion of your claims are accepted on first submission);
- Write down a powerful and meaningful performance improvement goal (my practice will have over 95% of its claims accepted on the initial transmission);
- Create a "goal ladder" where each rung of the ladder represents an incremental, achievable goal on the way toward your ultimate goal. For instance your may set incremental goals of improving your clean claim performance by 1 percent each month; and
- Create a plan for how you will learn from rejected claims.
With this approach you can make 2009 your best medical billing year ever.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II
About the Author:
You can learn more about world-class medical billing companies by going to ClaimCare's medical billing blog. Learn about achieving personal and business success at MyMerlin.net the on-line mentoring site.
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