5 Tips to Reduce AR Days in Medical Billing

5 Best Practices to Reduce Your Days in AR

1. Analyzing and Addressing Contributing Factors

Simply knowing your AR days does not suffice. It’s important to understand what’s causing delays in the first place. Are all payers (insurance companies) around the same average AR days? Or are a couple of big players in your payer mix consistently late? What type of denial is the most common?

Gaining such clarity tells you where your money is stuck and where you should focus. For example, you could define an aging threshold for each plan type from your payer mix, setting clear goals for payments.

2. Ensuring Clean Claims Submissions

Your AR days depend on your claims submissions. Getting a reimbursement in the first submission is the key factor in keeping your AR days to a minimum. For this, it’s important to maintain a low gap between the date of service and claim submission and high operational quality at all levels.

For starters, ensure that doctors complete the documentation of patients’ medical records and provide approval to billers on time. At the front desk, it’s great practice to verify insurance eligibility, obtain pre-authorization, and confirm co-pays and deductibles upfront to prevent issues down the road.

Subsequently, having a well-trained staff is vital in ensuring clean claims submissions and reducing your AR days. A knowledgeable team that is adept in insurance verification, coding practices, and patient communication can significantly reduce errors and streamline the billing process. 

3. Enhancing Denial Management

Frequent denials become a significant contributor to long AR days, but proactive denial management practices can minimize the challenge. Setting up a monthly tracking and reporting system to document and categorize denials can help you analyze trends, identify root causes, and take relevant corrective actions.

Establishing a prompt re-submission protocol is equally as crucial in keeping the ball rolling. The quicker you resolve issues and resubmit claims within the filing time limit, the faster you will reduce your AR days.

4. Regular Monitoring and Follow-ups

When you document denials and maintain a monthly record, you’ll have a list of claims that require monitoring and follow-ups, either with the patient or the payer. It’s important to make this monitoring and subsequent follow-up processes central to your workflows. 

Defining a set system for follow-ups can help convert your outstanding AR days into cash flows. It helps to sort your pending claims based on priority—whether it’s by the oldest, biggest value, or denial trends. This creates a systematic monitoring and follow-up framework, ensuring that you close all loops and get your claim reimbursements on time.

Some additional measures for reducing your AR days

• Foster strong communication between your billing team and healthcare providers.

• Hold routine staff training sessions to stay up-to-date on coding and billing regulations.
• Ensure that you have set contracts with insurers.

5. Outsourcing to Billing Experts

Most practices that suffer from long AR are the ones trying to handle multiple things at once. In such cases, outsourcing your medical billing can do wonders for keeping your AR days in check. Medical billing professionals, with their extensive domain knowledge and expertise in submitting clean claims, handling denials, and managing delays, are the perfect way to speed up collections.

At Lister, we specialize in streamlining your medical billing and optimizing your revenue cycle to minimize your AR days. Our experts understand the intricacies of the billing process and deploy the best practices that encourage fewer claim denials, faster reimbursements, and a significant reduction in your AR days.

Key Takeaway

Medical billing is a time-sensitive endeavor. Delays in any step can impact the revenue cycle, leaving you to deal with long AR days. This is why keeping your AR days in check requires a fundamental transformation of your revenue cycle management process, with key adjustments as discussed above.

But this requires time, effort, and constant vigilance—resources that are often already preoccupied in busy medical centers. Partnering with Lister’s medical billing team gets you access to specialized skills, advanced technology, and industry-leading expertise to speed up your revenue cycle. With decades of expertise, we have a proven track record of over 98% in first pass acceptance rate, while keeping >90 AR days reduced to less than 10%.

If you want us to find the best ways to reduce the AR days in your medical billing, send us an email at contact@listerventures.com. Our experts will conduct a free mini-audit to review your existing processes, identify areas of improvement, and suggest corrective actions.