What is urgent care billing?
Today Urgent care is a thriving business. However, it is not a substitute for primary care. It is a different domain that needs proper knowledge, skill set, and experience and even billers and coders to manage it all.
In a recent survey, urgent care centers handle about 79 million patient visits every year and the number is still increasing.
A patient dealing with health problems that need attention on an urgent basis but the problem is not considered life threatening, falls under urgent care services. Even though it is not considered an emergency situation but if not treated within 24 hours time, urgent care has the potential to progress into a threat, for instance, situations like – injuries or illnesses including sprains problems, ear infections, sports injuries and minor burns etc.
Urgent care is a domain where providers need to stay up to date on the constant change in billing and coding changes in order to get reimbursed properly.
Providing immediate attention with timely submission of claims along with the right specific codes pertaining to this specialty, urgent care biller further needs to ensure error-free claims for accurate and timely reimbursement.
The complex CPT affair of urgent care:
The urgent care codes generally have the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes from – 99202 – 99215, where codes 99202 and 99211 to 99212 are classified as Level I services. CPT Codes 99203 and 99213 are considered level II services and have a higher reimbursement rate than Level I and CPT Codes 99204 to 99205 and 99214 to 99215 are considered Level III services and have a higher reimbursement rate than Level I. Furthermore, there are also two main ‘S’ code categories that are exclusive to urgent care billing and coding operations.
However, with the constant shift in the healthcare industry and as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issues new updates annually that can cause a huge error if not updated properly – is often the cause of many urgent care billing and coding concerns. In fact today the major issues for more than 84 % of urgent care centers and practices are that with the numerous amounts of administrative work, in-house billers and coders often end up missing out on timely claims submission, or at times even code updates which often lead to huge revenue losses for the urgent care providers. Thus, most of the centers are looking for a convenient and reliable partner that can cater to all urgent care coding and billing needs.
The Sunknowledge help:
Catering to the needs of many urgent care centers, Sunknowledge Services Inc for the last few years is delivering outstanding support solutions that have helped many with improved ROI efficiently. Understanding that urgent care and primary care have similar guidelines and being up to date with the constant codes, Sunknowledge coders carefully assign the right code for the medical service rendered. In fact, by ensuring the right checks and balances, we guarantee 99.9 % accuracy, reducing your chances of billing and errors in coding.
Ensuring timely claims submission and constant follow up so you do not leave out money on the table; our expert reduces your operational expenses by 80% as well. Improving your ROI and resolving old aging accounts, the expert guarantees optimal reimbursement.