How One Alabama Clinic Revamped Their Billing Process

An overhaul of the facility's practice management system helped stabilize its finances.

Financial stability is a concern for many providers and it’s no different for central Alabama-based UAB Selma Family Medicine Center.

In 2022, staffing challenges and limited resources had the practice struggling to ensure quality of care and efficient operations, which began to negatively impact the financial state of the facility.

The medical center knew that their time should be spent focused on their patient population and not billing office tasks. To improve efficiency and streamline operations, the facility decided to implement new tech solutions into their processes, specifically for billing.

“I wasn’t really happy with how hard [staff] had to work to get the claims paid and money in the bank,” Jeff Denney, administrative director, told HealthLeaders. “It wasn’t always timely. I didn’t have good reports. It was hard to check in to see how [operations] were doing on the surface.”

Selma Family Medicine had always done its billing in-house but Denney saw the potential to improve efficiency with a new practice management system. While the implementation was successful, there was a learning curve to overcome as the facility’s previous system had been in place for about a decade.

“[At the time] everybody on the leadership side of the business office was very tenured and were reluctant to learn anything new, so that was a hurdle,” he said. For the most part, Denney added, staff weren’t apprehensive about bringing in a new system because they knew it would ultimately help them.

While demoing the new system, he was particularly impressed with having a team on the system’s side managing the reporting for coding, billing, and collections, and how much easier it made things for him and business office staff.

As part of the reporting support, the system has a feature that shows real-time updates, where staff can see where any holdups or missing items are and help move processes along.

“By outsourcing, you’ve got people who are working all day, every day, know the business in and out, and supporting you at a high level,” Denney said. “I feel like I know a lot more about the health of the practice, especially, as far as the claims, billing, and collections go.”

Not only did the new system solve an immediate problem, but it improved workflow efficiency.  Staff now have time to complete other tasks in addition to their usual ones, and the practice’s billing, coding, collection, and reimbursement benchmarks have seen substantial improvement.

There has been a reduction in overall denials and day in accounts receivable, the latter by 78%. The gross collection rate has gone up 39%, as well as payments per encounter by 64%.