Posts Tagged ‘Medical Bills’

What Can A Legal Fund Do For You?

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Imagine this: You recently meet an accident and you filed a physical injury case in court.  Your present predicament may have forced you to leave from work.  Finances went out of the way due to legal expenses.  To make matters worse, the case has stayed in court for months already and you’ve exhausted all your savings and other funds.  This is not the dead end.  Legal funding companies like AM Legal Funding exist for people like you. 

Legal funding companies specialize in granting legal fund for someone who is in the middle of legal suit provided that he is eligible.  The company takes the risk of granting a certain amount determined through the nature of your case and the probability of winning the case.  This loan is considered non-recourse for the company cannot demand to get the money back in the event that the plaintiff lost the case.

Your lawyer can help you by way of suggesting a company where you can obtain a loan on the basis of your pending case.  Bear in mind that a lawyer could not become a creditor to the client as this becomes a conflict of interest.  The legal funding company is the one that will determine the probability of your case and the amount that can be won from the case.  Then they will offer you an amount and send it to your bank account within 24 hours after it is approved.  So what can this legal fund do for you?

First, it can help solve cash flow problems.  The cash advance that you can get through a legal funding company can be used for expenses and other financial needs.  You can pay your medical bills with the money from the legal funding company.  You can also use that money to pay for other expenses if you can’t work due to your physical limitations.  In this way, you don’t have to mortgage your home and other properties that you worked hard for to acquire.

Second, you can use the money to get an experienced lawyer to increase your chances of winning the case.  This can also improve the chance of settlement thereby ending the case before greater expenses are incurred.  The legal funding will also prevent you from not pursuing the case due to financial constraints. 

Third, as previously stated the fund is considered a non-recourse loan so you get to keep the cash advance whether you win or lost the lawsuit.  You don’t pay anything in return if you lost the case.  The company only gets paid if the case is won by the one who applied for it.  

You don’t have to wait for a long time for the monetary award you will probably get from the corporation you’ve filed the case against with.  It is common for big corporations to exhaust everything just to delay the decisions for years.  Receive the deserved justice for yourself now without risking any of your properties.  Shop around now to find the best available company in your area.  If you want the one that is most reliable and offers the fastest approval, AM Legal Funding is the one that is best for you.

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Medical Billing Service – Assess Performance with These Key Metrics

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

A good Medical Billing Service has the remarkable potential to increase your collection rates by forty percent or more. However, how do they do it? Good metrics are the key to effectiveness of a medical billing service. Like any high performing business, they measure their performance with dependable metrics.

Collecting medical bills is an onerous task. The billing rules are extremely complex, terminology difficult and the deadlines very strict. There is no single billing procedure that could be applied throughout the billing process. Additionally, the medical insurance companies are notorious for trying to avoid paying the bills. Due to such complexity, reliable metrics become even more important to optimize the medical bill collections

If you are considering hiring a medical billing service provider, carefully evaluate their performance measurement system, and the process used to respond to any payment issues or holdups that may arise for collecting the bills.

Following are some of the most important performance measurement metrics that an effective medical billing service should track and report to you.

  1. Gross and Net Collection Ratio: Gross collection ratio is the amount paid to the practice divided by the total charges billed. This does not include any write-offs. This ratio depends on the practice and the payer mix. A higher payer mix consisting of Medicaid and Medicare may result in lower gross collection ratio. It is best to compare this ratio to practices that are similar to yours. Net collections is the ratio of payments to charges after the adjustments due to write offs. For a high performing service, this ratio is typically over 90%.
  2. Days in Accounts Receivable: Time elapsed between billing and collection is an important metric to evaluate efficiency of a billing service. Number of days it takes to collect a bill depends on the medical specialties but a billing service can affect it by timely follow up with the payer and quick rectification of any issues that may arise.
  3. Percent of Bills Past Due: It is important to track past due bills. Billing service should report this as number and percent of accounts that are 60, 90, 120 days past due. It should have effective analysis process to troubleshoot the reasons for accounts falling in past due status. A good billing service would constantly improve upon its processes to shrink the accounts getting past due.
  4. Patient Liability: Percent of Patient Liability is the ratio of patient responsibility to total billed charges. This is roughly equal to the patient deductibles. This metric is important to track the effectiveness of the front office function since the co-pay is generally collected by the doctor’s office before the service is rendered.
  5. First pass pay rate: This indicates the percentage of filed claims that are paid without any need of follow up. Obviously, higher the percentage, more efficient is the medical billing service. This metric should steadily show improvement. Any dip in first pass pay rate is a red flag and should be properly investigated.
  6. Denial Rate: Denial rates tell you about the claims that required a follow up during a given period. Billing service should regularly monitor this metric and troubleshoot the causes of denial to keep the denial rate as low as possible.

Medical billing is just too complex, a convoluted process that makes it almost impossible to measure efficiency unless there are good tracking metrics in place. Additionally, it is important to respond quickly to any inefficiency or deterioration in performance. Therefore, in this digital age a monthly paper statement listing the performance metrics is not an acceptable means of reporting. An efficient medical billing service provides means to track these performance metrics via a web portal and promises continuous improvement in performance. Hire an effective and transparent billing service and you would definitely see an improvement in collections.

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