Automate Your Patient Billing With Electronic Remittance Advice
By Lori Anderson

Would you like to enter payments on all your patient claims in the blink of an eye? With electronic remittance advice, you can.

When looking for new practice management medical billing software solutions, be sure to investigate the availability electronic remittance for your system. Consider the money you could save on labor by reducing hours of data entry. Download an electronic explanation of benefits (EOB) file into your practice management system directly from the insurance carrier.

Most electronic remittance advice-capable systems allow you to automatically post insurance payments and write-offs to the correct patient ledgers without using costly staff time. Any remittance errors from insurers can be viewed easily with color-coded error messages that are clear and concise. Additionally, with a software solution, experienced technical support assistance is never more than a phone call away.

Let’s evaluate the manual and automatic processes to reconciling EOBs.

Manual process:1. Receive paper EOB and insurance check.2. Spend hours typing data from the EOB detail and posting payments to patient’s accounts.3. Spend time looking for data entry errors if totals don’t add up.4. Spend minutes looking for remittance errors that caused denial of items..5. Fix the errors.6. Write up deposit ticket yourself.

Automated process:1. Receive electronic EOB and a paper EOB with

a check.2. Payments are posted instantly from the electronic EOB and matched against the check.3. Instantly see any errors in red.4. Fix the errors.5. Print auto-populated deposit ticket.

The convenience of electronic remittance overcomes a common concern that physician’s practices billing personnel have expressed concerning paper explanation of benefits (EOBs). Historically, EOBs have come with insufficient remittance information, leading to confusion and frustration in trying to reconcile payments with submitted claims. By providing detailed electronic remittance advices, software solutions will break down these traditional barriers to efficiency. Electronic remittance eliminates the hand re-keying of remittance information, saving time and resources while significantly lowering your accounts receivable costs.

Lori Anderson, an independent consultant with LAtech, works with Antek HealthWare on their <a href="http://www.antekhealthware.com/daqbilling.php”> DAQbilling Medical Billing Software </a> and <a href="http://www.antekhealthware.com/LabDAQ.php"> LabDAQ Laboratory Information System </a> projects, since 1991. With vast experience in the medical field her writing expertise includes laboratory operations, billing services, and private practice operations.