Question

Why is it important to keep adequate records and make sure that your billing is correct? Why is this so important to the doctor you work for? Why is this so critical to the doctor’s success in the clinic? write 2 paragraphs

Your responsibility as a Medical Office Assistant is made up of several things. Taking care of the doctor, the patients, the office, the mail, faxes and so on. Billing is the one responsibility that is first and foremost. What makes this part so important? Write 4 paragraphs

Answer 1

Answer 1: The importance of medical records for maintaining all patient healthcare activities has increased lately. Essentially, they are a critical part of a doctor’s ethical and statutory duty in ensuring good patient care. Medical records represent a patient’s medical, health/social history, diagnosis, condition, treatment or assessment, created or maintained by a healthcare professional. It is necessary to maintain sound medical records for proper ongoing care of the patient and maintain effective communication between healthcare professionals and their patients.

To ensure proper patient care and submit insurance claims, accurate billing should be maintained. Medical coding is a process that obtains information about diagnosis, treatments, and medications through transcriptions, medical notes, electronic records, lab results (blood work, urinalysis and pathology) and radiologic assessments and converts them into alphanumeric codes. These coding experts transfer the codes to medical billing systems and patient records. This information is very critical for the doctor in ensuring proper treatment of the patient as it can greatly affect the doctor’s success in the clinic. Also, maintaining a correct billing is an essential step required to submit medical claims with insurers as well as bills for insurers and patients. Medical billing plays an important role in ensuring swift operation of the revenue process.

Answer 2:

Medical office assistant is responsible for performing both administrative and clinical tasks in a doctor's or healthcare professional’s office, mainly keeping track of patient records/health insurance forms and deal with health insurance billing. They act as a communication link between insurance companies, pharmacies, and patients. Though it is the foremost priority of the doctors or healthcare professionals to take care of the patients, but it still becomes necessary to generate revenue in order to keep the practice running. To achieve this, medical billing should be in place.

Medical billing is considered as the most important responsibility as the billers keep record of all the patient details related to diagnosis, treatments, and medications. Medical billing is an important functional area that helps in maximizing the revenue for the healthcare professional/ the doctor. Billers make a claim for insurance using a form or software, forward the claim to the insurance company for evaluation and further assess how much of bill the patient owes the doctor after the insurance is taken out. Medical billing professionals stay up to date on the latest codes for different conditions and compare the revenue of the old code to that of the new code.

Medical billing requires submitting claims, posting payments, billing patients, and following up on unpaid accounts. Keeping the patient information current is important to manage patient accounts because if the patient accounts are not well maintained, it requires a lot of time and effort to clean up, which result in a lot of lost revenue.

The existence and financial health of a medical practice or facility is dependent on the billing process as it is the responsibility of the biller to ensure that the healthcare provider gets paid. In short, medical billing is important because that is how the doctors and their staff get paid. The billing professional keeps abreast of the insurance company approaches and make sure that bills and claims are paid at the suitable rate, thereby maximizing the revenue.