I came in about 40 minutes late this morning as I had a dentist appointment. I was a bit peeved that I missed the first part of the day and was glad to get started. I started off the day by doing more MIPS work and learning about the way it works. I also spent some time looking at the specific measures that are required for physicians to report when doing procedures. It was pretty cool to see the “inner workings” of how the physicians are paid and how they have a sort of figurative “oversight.”
I then spent the rest of the morning with the billing manager, which was a highly enjoyable experience. She has been with the practice for around 28 years, and seems to have had a wonderful time with it. I really appreciated her incredibly positive and welcoming attitude. That’s certainly not to say that the others I’ve worked with weren’t welcoming as well, but I was quite impressed with her warmth. While I was with her, she was working on credentialing for all the physicians and CRNAs, which I quickly realized is a highly complicated and involved process which requires significant focus and attention to detail. However, it was clear with all of her years of experience that she’s become quite the expert. There were literally several thousand papers that she has to keep up with at all times, all filed very neatly into cabinets, and I’m positive that she must’ve known where exactly every single paper was located.
The credentialing process for each physician and CRNA is very important, as it is what allows them to get reimbursed for their services. The process involves acquiring a significant amount of information from the physicians and CRNAs and then sending that information off to each of the insurance companies with which Regional Anesthesia is in network. In network essentially means that they work together. It is highly important that she receives all of this information, because then she has to create individual credentials for each individual CRNA and physician and then for individual insurance company. So, in essence, she has to keep track of a ton of different documents to make sure they get sent to each insurance company and that they are formatted correctly for that specific company. She told me that the most difficult part is making sure that they are fulfilling all of the requirements for each insurance company, as she said that all of the requirements are different. As such, each physician has upwards of ten different sets of lengthy packets of documents. This all seemed extremely daunting and overwhelming to me, but with her experience, it seemed to be almost second nature to her.
The afternoon was a little bit more low key, and I spent most of the time going over reconciliations and collections with the office manager and one of the financial people. It’s crazy it has almost come to an end!
