Medical Billing & Credentialing News

  Telehealth, the Provision of Remote Healthcare Telehealth is Useful, but is it Here to Stay? Maybe we really don’t want to talk about it, but truth is,  major calamities like the COVID-19 pandemic often lead to innovations in healthcare.   As a prime example,  the use of virtual care skyrocketed as people – asked to socially distance – looked for substitutes for in-person visits.  The frequency and popularity of virtual care helped demonstrate the value of safe, top-notch and accessible care provided through  telehealth . It also proved that millions of people want it. But will telehealth stay around post-COVID-19? When COVID-19 hit, 41 percent of U.S. adults postponed or simply stopped looking for in-person medical care.  One reason, of course, was the temporary or permanent shutting down of  medical practices  due to the pandemic. Another frequent justification by patients was the fear of exposure to the coronavirus from an in-person...

Provider-Payer Relationship Under COVID-19 COVID-19 Upset Provider-Payer Relationships The  COVID-19  pandemic has affected most, if not all, businesses everywhere.  For healthcare, in particular, the pandemic and its consequences altered the ways that payers and providers do business with one another. How So? Let’s catch a momentary peek at several of the more immediate effects on payer-provider relationships, consisting of upturns in the instability in patients’ insurance coverage and a drop in the number of patients, particularly for non-essential treatments. From there, let’s review the best ways to respond to these challenges going forward, including expanding services, reexamining contracts and working with payers to provide the best outcomes. To begin, let’s examine how things were prior to the pandemic. How Things were Before COVID-19 Payers and providers functioned in relative harmony prior to the pandemic. Both sides profited from issues such as steady but contr...

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in Medical Billing What Exactly is Robotic Process Automation? When you come across the term “ robotic process automation ,” you might think it sounds rather futuristic. However,  RPA , as it’s often termed,  is a technology being deployed more and more in the healthcare industry, including  medical billing . Robotic process automation  (software) consists of tools that  partly or fully automate human behaviors that are manual, rule-based and usually tedious.  RPA works by imitating the actions of a real human working together with one or more software applications to accomplish tasks such as data entry and process traditional transactions or reply to simple customer service inquiries. The Value of RPA Healthcare organizations function in real-time without any slack . Awkward, error-prone assignments slow processes and influence everything from cost structures to compliance to the patient experience . RPA creates proficienci...

  Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare No matter the industry, artificial intelligence (Ai) has become routine. When it comes to healthcare,  AI helps practitioners streamline tasks, expand operational efficiencies and simplify complicated medical procedures. Although AI is certainly transforming the healthcare industry, this technology is still quite new. As AI acceptance grows, however, questions about both the benefits and limits of this technology become even more relevant. Let’s look a bit closer at some of these issues. Benefits of AI in Medicine Delivers real-time data A significant piece of diagnosing and attending to medical issues is first obtaining the most accurate information in a timely manner.  With AI, doctors and other healthcare providers can leverage immediate and clear-cut information to speed up and improve vital clinical decision-making . Producing quicker and more...