When it comes to medical billing, tiny mistakes can end up costing customers thousands of dollars. Thanks to all the bureaucracy surrounding healthcare and insurance companies, these types of slip-ups are very common. People who want to protect themselves from being overcharged need to carefully check their bills for these common errors.
Duplicate Billing
Duplicate billing often happens when a doctor and a nurse both put the billing code for a procedure or medication on a patient’s chart without realizing the other healthcare provider already billed the patient. This is one of the simplest problems to fix because all patients need to do is look over an itemized bill and pay attention to any costs that are identical.
To help insurance and healthcare providers handle bills, every medical procedure, treatment, medication, and service has a specific code. If the wrong code is accidentally put in, a person could end up with issues like being charged for name brand medication when they used a generic. To prevent this problem, doctors need to update coding books yearly and consider using electronic records instead of handwritten ones.
Any sort of minor inaccuracy, like mistyping an insurance ID or misspelling a patient’s name, can lead to an insurance company rejecting a claim. Preventing this common error is particularly difficult because it requires patients, doctors, and insurance providers to carefully go over all a patient’s medical and financial records to find the mistake.
An issue that many patients and doctors run into is a failure to verify insurance before deciding on treatment. Healthcare insurance is always changing, so patients can end up on the hook for formerly covered charges. Taking the time to be sure that a person is eligible before a service is performed can help ensure patients are actually able to pay bills.
Most hospitals have negotiated deals with insurance companies where certain charges can be bundled together and paid for a lower fee. If someone accidentally lists services separately, a patient can end up paying far too much. Avoiding this error requires precise data entry and full knowledge of the intricacies of healthcare insurance.
Understanding these terms can help you to find and fix medical billing mistakes if they happen to you or someone you love. Without knowing it, many people are losing money to these kinds of mistakes everyday. With a little bit of medical billing education, you could potentially save yourself quite a bit of money!
Originally published on PatsyGallian.org.
