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Thursday 10 March 2011

Claims Processing System: A Cost Saving Option for Claims Processing



The world is changing and so is the healthcare industry; the healthcare IT systems like claims processing systems are gaining immense popularity across the entire healthcare and medical insurance industry, In fact, the manual methods of processing the medical claims is very tedious, which involves consumption of large no. of man hours. The processing takes long time and is often not free from errors that again results into more wastage of time. The reimbursement usually takes long time resulting into inconvenience for the submitter.

Taking into consideration the advantages of claims processing systems; the penetration of electronic claims processing has increased by leaps and bounds. According to a recent study, the 3 / 4 ths of all health insurance claims are now submitted electronically, up from 24 percent in 1995, allowing 98 percent of claims to be processed within a month of receipt from the health care provider. The proportion of insurance claims submitted to health plans electronically has more than tripled in the last decade, reducing administrative costs and significantly speeding up payments to doctors and hospitals.

In 2002, just 44 percent of claims were submitted electronically, compared to 75 percent today. More & more healthcare providers are implementing claims processing systems. The reason is quite obvious - there is often a significant delay before health insurance plans receive claims from health care providers, especially for those claims still submitted on paper.  In 2006, nearly 3 claims in ten were received more than 30 days after the date of patient service, with one-third of the paper claims not reaching the insurer for 60 days or more. Electronic claims processing has put a check-mark on delayed claim submissions.

Manual claims processing is very costly; the amount spent on paper claims processing is about $1.58. Pended claims requiring manual or other review cost $2.05 on average per claim to process. Where as, the average cost of processing a clean electronic claim with the help of claims processing system is just about 85 cents, nearly half the cost of processing a clean paper claim. Pended claims requiring manual or other review cost $2.05 on average per claim to process.  Huge quantity of claims need to be submitted & processed each month; the amount saved by implementing a claims system could be a big money for the providers and healthcare facilities.

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