While how much of a medical practice’s administrative overhead can be classified as “waste” is still open to debate, two new studies posted on the Health Affairs Web site attempt to put a price tag on these clerical tasks and on how much a medical practice must spend before it can extract a check from an insurance company.
In one study, researchers calculated that the annual cost of performing billing-related tasks comes to about $85,276 per physician. In the other, it was estimated that the total cost of the nation’s physician-health plan interactions is somewhere between $23 billion and $31 billion.
The authors of the first study concluded that automation could be helpful in reducing claims denials, ensuring coding compliance and reducing days in accounts receivable, and that standardization of benefit plans “appears to offer great potential” to decrease costs. The authors of the second study noted that their high-end estimate of physician-health plan interaction costs, $31 billion, is equal to six times the amount the federal government spends on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The studies were co-sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Above article published on http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20090515/REG/305159992
