What can Increase the cost of Medical Credentialing?
Has anyone noticed lately the cost of living going down? I mean, I know the gas prices are changing constantly, they go up, and then they go down. Not to date myself, but I can remember when I was in High School that I could receive $20 dollars for the week; $10 of it would go towards gas, and the other $10 would go towards food. Man! “Those were the Good Ol Days!”
Anyways, we are not here for me to reminisce about the past. We are here to talk about why medical credentialing prices keep changing.
- Lazy and Inefficient Workers
There is nothing worse that will burn through your wallet than a lazy worker. Especially if you’re paying them hourly. In a perfect world, we would just duplicate ourselves and be super-efficient all the time. Unfortunately, we need to hire people and hope for the best that they’ll work like they should, or as you expect them to, and also take pride in their work.
- Medical Credentialing & Payer Enrollment Rules Ever Changing
We all know that the Center for Medicare Services is forever changing their provider credentialing and payer enrollment rules, their billing rules, fee schedules, etc. These changes affect all credentialing processes. If your medical credentialing staff doesn’t remain on top of all changes, this could delay your credentialing and also cause denials. You want to ensure that you have staff that continues to educate themselves with these changes and implement them into their credentialing workflow. If they don’t, this can cost you time and
money.
- Increase Of Technology
Convenience can be a very expensive thing. Back in the day we used to fax over documents, or keep all documentations in a filing cabinet. Or heaven forbid, we have to write a letter to communicate to someone. So with that being said, welcome to 2017! Where you can store all of your documents on secured servers, scan and then email documents in a matter of seconds.
All of this sounds great, and super convenient, but like I said, it comes with a price. The servers need to be secured, especially with HIPAA rules and requirements. Which means that we need to buy expensive and secure servers, host our servers in a secure data center, contract with a third party credentialing software vendor, and also purchase equipment to scan documents and ensure that all emails which contain sensitive data are sent encrypted. Nowadays, time is money, and money is time!
- Medical Credentialing Responsibilities Are Sometimes Shared Among Several Different People
We are all familiar with the term Pipeline right? Where one task needs to be completed before the next one can be done. Well, when it comes to credentialing, there are several pipelines that can hold up a process. Like I stated before, “Time is Money.”
- When An Organization Only Has One Person That Specializes In Credentialing
This is going to be the phrase of this blog “Time is Money.” If an organization only has one person that is responsible for all of your credentialing, then you can imagine that is a very busy person depending on the size of your practice. One of the important factors of a one man/woman show is that you must have a good credentialing system or database to manage all credentialing tasks, provider documents and all confidential data. A system that can help keep track of expireable dates as well. The downfall of this method though, is all the responsibility of entering the data relies on an individual.
- Get With The Times And Accept Change!
If you are a company providing medical credentialing services, then you cannot operate like you used to 20 years ago. There are more medical & behavioral healthcare practices, and other practitioners that require assistance with physician credentialing or even nursing credentials. We need to keep up with technology to stay efficient. As time goes on, the process will evolve and make it so we can complete our tasks in a timely fashion and be more accurate.
STAT MedCare has developed its own proprietary credentialing application which can be utilized by any medical or behavioral healthcare practice, any type of practitioner and any office that handles credentialing and provider enrollment. Of course, STAT MedCare can also assist you with ALL of your credentialing, provider enrollment and expirable data requirements. Please go download our Payor Enrollment Checklist. This will help you stay on task, and make sure things get done.
Since 2003, STAT MedCare, LLC has been an expert in Provider Enrollment, Licensing, Rate Negotiation, and other Credentialing-related services. STAT’s mission is, “Providing Client Services on a foundation of Trust and Integrity.” We stay on top of teaching, training, and equipping to properly manage the workplace as an industry expert. STAT has submitted/renewed 250,000+ licenses, submitted more than 10,000 appeals, and renegotiated more than 3,000 contracts. STAT services practices and organizations who are start-ups, surviving, experiencing (rapid) growth, or maturing Enterprise clients. Contact our Sales team for a free consultation at 877-887-1784, Ext. 505