Patient Billing Process Essay

When you visit the doctor’s office a person doesn’t think about all the steps it takes to process your visit and what the office does to receive payment from the insurance company. As a patient, the focus is seeing the doctor, telling him or her the symptoms, getting the doctor’s assurance that your health will be back to normal in a few days to a week and getting a prescription for medication. There is a process to making the following steps work smoothly and precisely. The procedures begin with preregistering the patient, establishing financial responsibility, check the patients in, reviewing coding compliance, reviewing billing compliance, check out patients, monitor payer adjudication, generate patient statements and finally follow up payments and collections. Each step has to be done thoroughly by attaining the information necessary to process the claim for the care provider. This will ensure that they will receive payment for the care and services they provided for the patient. A billing and coding specialist will be placed in any of these areas to help the office attain their …show more content…
This will be the last step in the encounter with the patient until their next visit but the beginning of the interaction with their insurance company reimbursing for services. The new patient has come to the checkout desk and handed the encounter form to the insurance specialist. The charges are calculated using the encounter form. Depending on the physician’s office set up, the co-payment or co-insurance could be taken at this point. If there are any balances from prior visits that need to be settled, any non-covered services, if the physician is a nonparticipating provider, deductibles and if the patient is self-paying. A receipt for their records will be given to them. If the doctor has requested any lab work, follow up visit, or to be seen by a specialist it will be discussed with the patient at this