Estimating Patient Charges

Is estimating patient charges time consuming for your practice?

Medical practices are used to good faith estimates, but what if a self pay patient’s charge is more complex than a simple procedure code?  Today’s BIG idea is from an orthopedic practice that wants to estimate more complex patient charges.  Their idea is to grab all patient encounters with a given procedure code on the encounter, then use that historical data to estimate a patient’s charges and payments based on all encounters containing that procedure code.  The podcast will give you some ideas about aging the claim to ensure the claim has had a chance to be paid and some ideas about how you might use this data.  How would your practice use data like this?  I hope these podcasts give you ideas to make your practice better.