Bi-County Ambulance Service, located in Northern California, is a 911 ambulance company with an annual trip volume about 26,000 calls. We have about 104 field crew and five billers including myself. Prior to RescueNet Billing Pro, my staff used a massive excel spreadsheet that housed all the insurances websites, usernames and passwords in order to find and verify a patient’s insurance. The process was tedious.
I have one staff member that does pre-bills, so it would take her all morning, and sometimes into the afternoon, to pre-bill the prior day’s calls. At that time, our bills would take an average of a day and a half or two days to go out the door. We had a couple thousand accounts that were self-pay that we just couldn’t get valuable information on – whether it be getting ahold of the patient or finding health insurance – so about 250 accounts a month would end up going to collections.
Increased Efficiencies Make Billing Easier
Now that we have RescueNet Billing Pro, we only send around 70 accounts per month to collections. We start by entering all the patient information that isn’t completed by our field crew at the time of call (our crews gather the very basic information) that we obtain from either the hospital portal or the face sheets collected. And with a click of a button, Billing Pro verifies the insurance information entered. If we’re missing information, we can request patient demographics with another click to see if the insurance discovery feature pulls back any health insurance information.
There are several additional advantages to having RescueNet Billing Pro aside from finding patient demographics, verification of health insurance eligibility and insurance discovery. For example, we now hold our transport from being billed out until the deductibles have been met (up to a max of six weeks). I have set up a separate workflow for all accounts that haven’t satisfied their deductible. My staff checks those accounts every Friday by clicking update deductible under the insurance verification in RescueNet Billing Pro. Waiting for the deductible to be met has helped increase the amount of money we are able to collect from patients.
Also, when you verify health insurance, it provides an address for the patient, which we have found helpful for our return mail. Most times, the health insurance providers have the most up-to-date updated address compared to the hospital. You can easily find this information in the subscriber portion of the insurance verification information.
Process Clean Claims Faster: the Power of ePCR Plus Billing Pro
If you have RescueNet ePCR through ZOLL it makes entering charges faster as well. Instead of clicking through several pages of documentation in the ePCR, you have everything you would need to have a clean claim to bill to your health insurance in one screen with Billing Pro. All ALS services are highlighted in red in the treatment summary of the Billing Pro window. This cuts down entering charges and filling out proper fields that need to be completed to have a clean claim the first time.
