Physician Billing - Research Paper Example

A more specific term comes out of medical billing is the physician billing which has eight potholes: previsit process, patient check-in process, charge capture and entry process, claim process, payment posting process, account follow-up process, denial management process, and patient collections process (Walker, Larch, and Woodcock, 2004). Each pothole must be avoided at all cost to ensure the smoothness and speed of the billing process. Physician Billing In all types of businesses and professional practices, transactions are inevitable and the one giving the service will get to earn from his efforts while satisfying the needs of the clients.

Nobody can deny that money is a need to be able to facilitate exchange and to allow anyone to purchase his needs and wants. In the process of transactions, billing is a primary concern. According to Business Dictionary (n.d.), billing is the “process of generating an invoice to recover sales price from the customer and is also called Invoicing.” In the process, the business earns revenue wherein profits are made and the expenses of the business for the service are also covered. In other words, invoicing is important that the organization facilitates the process of getting paid after the service or product is delivered to the client which includes having billing accounts.

In that way, invoices are matched with the orders, efforts, and transaction records and for tracking the payments (Silverston, 2001). In the medical field, business is inevitable as hospitals and healthcare providers need to earn revenue to cover their operating expenses. For physicians, they need to earn profit from their expertise by assisting people with their physical ailments. For that reason, medical billing comes to life. Medical billing involves coding as the process is made to assist the physicians in processing insurance and medical claims effectively.

The process involves handling patient invoices and taking care of reimbursements. The reimbursement process contains the medical procedures and services rendered by medical doctors. As the processing of the billing becomes a career, a number code system had been created to assist the encoders in inputting the data with ease as numbers represent certain disease or injury. A software assists the medical billing representatives in recording the procedures and let the insurance software interpret the code flawlessly.

In that process, reimbursement is quick and physicians get their professional fee promptly. As medical billers do the job, they must understand the technicalities in the medical field like terminology, disease, anatomy and many more. They must be dependable in terms of knowledge, skills, and job habits and must have the knowhow when it comes to technicalities in invoicing (McGarry, 2003, p. 82). For those who plan to become a medical biller or choose medical billing as a career, they need to understand the basics and not just the definition of the work.

For some, medical billing is considered as business since they do the stuff at home and online. They are not employees that need to go to work in hospitals or offices everyday with scheduled fix time. Since technology has been advancing rapidly in the past years, internet becomes a powerful tool to start a business or career without leaving the house. The trend nowadays is the electronic medical billing that requires a personal computer to perform the tasks. It is