Medical coding, medical billing and revenue cycle management are significant sectors in healthcare. They are necessary to transform patients’ records into medical codes so that practitioners, surgeons, nurses, and physicians can be paid for their services.
Correct billing is a challenge that still, many health facilities around the world face. As these codes are typically used for patients and third-party insurers/payers, any slight mistake could lead to the delay or the rejection of the submitted claim. For instance, a total of USD 36 billion is lost every year in incorrect coding of payments.
How can artificial intelligence help medical billing and coding processes to improve?
Artificial intelligence is the ability of a system or a man-made software to automate the processes that we usually perform manually. Simply put, it is the use of an automated system that mimics a human’s cognitive and motor functions to perform various jobs in multiple fields.
There’s a lot of room for improvement in the medical billing and coding sector with the help of artificial intelligence. The ultimate goal experts seek is to use artificial intelligence to automate the entire coding process for the betterment of the field. Not only will it cut down labor costs but it will also eliminate 99% of human errors. That being said, let’s move to our next concern.
Problem with errors in Revenue cycle management
Incorrect filing of medical bills and codes could lead to claim denials. Not only is it a nuisance for the patients but also for the hospital staff. Denial codes tend to increase insurance costs and future bills. Incorrect claims in the medical coding sector are nightmares that cost everyone something, whether it be time or money.
Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare sector
As we already know, AI is taking the world by storm. No industry can now run without using the power of AI. Not only does it show great results but also has the potential to gather and analyze a large amount of data to predict the next best decisions for the healthcare facility.
Medical coding and billing involve a lot of processes including data generation, data analysis and inputs. So, there’s a lot of ways in which artificial intelligence could be used to streamline the medical billing and coding processes.
Some incredible benefits of artificial intelligence are:
Easy to adapt to new changes in the medical coding industry
A lot of old codes are replaced by new ones every year. We have already seen ICD-10 replace ICD-9, so there’s a high chance that big adjustments to this industry are just around the corner.
Big changes in the medical coding industry are very common but it takes time to adapt to new changes and the learning curve often leads to more errors in filing the claims.
AI can help prevent these errors. For instance, it can notify the coder if he or she enters a deleted code in the system.
Faster processing
Processing time is quite a challenge when it comes to medical billing and coding. It takes a specific amount of time for claiming each bill. Apart from improving accuracy in the coding industry, AI can also decrease the processing time.
With huge advancements in the technology sector, it would be wrong for any healthcare facility to not automate their medical billing and coding processes.