Dental medicine is often seen as a highly profitable healthcare stream with guaranteed long term returns. However, what most people fail to understand is the amount of complex planning and execution that goes into acquiring and maintaining that sustained level of profitability. Dental reimbursement rates are generally poorer than medical reimbursement rates. Given that, ensuring continual claim settlement and reduced claim rejection requires a dental medical practitioner to focus on final details of dental billing. Whether your Dental Medical Billing Services is in-house or outsourced, there are certain steps that you can take to ensure improved medical insurance reimbursement ratio –

1. End to End Medical Billing Solutions
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http://www.medicalbillersandcoders.com
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Improving Medical Billing Procedures to Avoid Optometry
Malpractice Claims
Optometry has emerged as an alternate medical stream that is fast sharing the burden of
primary eye care providers and offering increasingly specialized services. With healthcare
industry undergoing consistent reforms aimed at bringing more and more patients under
Medicare or Medicaid coverage, Optometry practitioners are experiencing an increasingly
diversified payer mix. While this means increased profitability and long term financial
sustainability for every Optometry practice, it also means an increased patient liability. Most
Optometry practices are prone to malpractice claims because patients can’t perceive the true
value of the services offered by an OD. More often than not, patients leave disgruntled due to
erroneous diagnosis and dissatisfactory healthcare services. To avoid Optometry malpractice
claims, the best way is to improve optometry medical billing.
Optometry Medical Billing practices are based on some fundamentals that can dramatically
enhance the productivity of medical billing if fine tuned properly.
 Coding and billing correctly – Biggest Optometry billing challenge lies in correctly assigning
codes for eye disorders diagnosed. Optometry medical billing primarily deals with 9900 and
9200 CPT codes which pertain to diagnosis alone. As the scope of Optometry is expanding,
OD practitioners are likely to employ more and more codes for varied procedure. This is
where the chances of error increase as many a times an incorrect code can get assigned to
diagnostic procedures. To avoid fraudulent billing charges and malpractice claim, therefore,
it is essential to update your EMR database with coding changes regularly.
 Updating and recording medical data electronically – In addition to coding, recording of
patient data in the HIPAA approved format is equally important to save your practice from
malpractice claims. Optometry medical billing is a niche and specialized area, wherein
regular coding changes are rare and therefore difficult to track. Healthcare industry has
adopted ICD-10 coding standards but majority of Optometry coding still happens with ICD-9
codes. Therefore, medical data recording has to be scrutinized and reviewed regularly to
maintain proper patient database.

2. End to End Medical Billing Solutions
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 Filing reimbursement claims after scrutiny – Many audit actions and malpractice claims are
triggered by incorrectly filed reimbursement claims. Hence, it is crucial to file for
reimbursement with medical carriers after thorough scrutiny ofmedical billing and
coding details.
 Conducting monthly audit reviews – In addition to reviewing reimbursement documents,
weekly and monthly audit reviews can dramatically improve the billing efficiency of your
Optometry practice. You can not only identify recurrent errors in your Optometry medical
billing but can also enhance the productivity of your revenue cycle.
 Tracking patient satisfaction – Malpractice claims stem from patient dissatisfaction, which
in turn arises due to insufficient attention to patient needs. Optometry services are
predominantly diagnosis and evacuation based. They rely heavily on the OD’s skill and
medical equipment’s available at the practice. Any gap in the delivery of care due to
untrained medical staff or inefficient billing practices results in customer dissatisfaction and
can cause malpractice claims at a later date. Therefore, Optometry medical billing should be
based on a fee-for-value or a pay-for-performance model to provide best eye care to
patients.
Medicalbillersandcoders.com is an Optometry medical billing expert that helps your OD practice
in developing medical billing procedures that are compliant to medical reforms and protect your
practice from any malpractice claims.