Medical Billing Forum

General Category => General Questions => : biller371 August 12, 2011, 04:33:32 PM

: New CFO looking for advice...will be adding questions on a daily basis
: biller371 August 12, 2011, 04:33:32 PM
I'm a new CFO in the medical billing world...now with less than 6 months of experience in the position, and no prior medical billing experience.  I'll be posting questions quite often, and on multiple forums.

In trying to manage the job and all the processes i'm running into issues on a daily basis:

1) My treasury department is killing me...making errors daily when logging in payments received at our office, batching payments to the wrong clients, scanning errors related to the checks, failing to pull down payments received at the client's office, or not keeping up with ERA's hitting the client's bank account.  The mail doesn't arrive until 9:30am, so my staff can't get everything opened, batched, and scanned by 2 or 2:30...meaning its a scamble to get a transfer created for the transfer before the close of every single day.

          What processes, protocols, software, equipment, etc exists or is currently being used elsewhere to assist with this?  I'm tired of my posting department having to catch my treasury departments mistakes. 

          What's out there in terms of transferring money to the clients that comes to our office?  Does anyone have good software or logs to keep up with it?  Whats being used, trust accounts, couriers? 

          Bottom line, throw some advice my way on how to clean up my treasury department.


2) Reporting...our reporting system is terrible.  What software is everyone using for daily, monthly, or special/custom internal and client reporting?  Is most of the billing world able to run reports right out of their billing software?  Or are you utilizing something like excel to run your reports through?

           Our reporting has become so involved, with clients asking daily for custom reports, my staff and myself simply could spend our entire days doing that alone.  I have one dedicated staff member, but because of the difficulties in running our reports, that person struggles to keep up as well.



3)  Posting...my posters aren't posting everything for the day...bottom line, they are leaving a lot on the table to do the next day, which means its a continuous stream of daily backlog which is never caught up until the end of the month and with a lot of overtime.  What's everyone doing in the posting area of things? 

Bottom line, i'm just looking for general advice right now to help me with this position, and will probably have more specific questions as things come up.

I look forward to learning a lot from everyone on here in the future.
: Re: New CFO looking for advice...will be adding questions on a daily basis
: Michele August 13, 2011, 10:32:10 AM
It sounds to me with the information you are describing is that the problem is with the employees and systems (not actual software, but the manner in which they do things) are the problem, not the software or equipment.  And if that is the case then there is no software out there that will fix that problem.  We bill for 70 plus providers and all reports both internal and ones we provide to our clients come from our PM system.  We currently use Lytec which isn't even one of the higher end ones.  We do very little in the way of custom reports for our clients.  Occasionally  we will have to do something unusual but not often.  Without knowing more details, it looks like the employees have fallen into a system that works out good for them.  Getting them to change will be difficult.  We have gone thru changes like that in the past.  Bad management had created and allowed bad practices.  Once we got rid of the bad management we still had to get rid of most of the employees because they were 'poisoned'. 

Best of luck!  You have a tough road ahead.
: Re: New CFO looking for advice...will be adding questions on a daily basis
: PMRNC August 13, 2011, 11:25:25 AM
Just curious but since you refer to the billing staff as the treasury dept., are you an offshore billing company?
: Re: New CFO looking for advice...will be adding questions on a daily basis
: QueenAlicia August 24, 2011, 04:50:18 PM
LOL at Linda....hmm that is a good question.
: Re: New CFO looking for advice...will be adding questions on a daily basis
: PMRNC August 24, 2011, 08:43:33 PM
LOL at Linda....hmm that is a good question.

Yeah I didn't want to break out the long winded post for offshore........   But I can shorten it.    GOT P&P?
: Re: New CFO looking for advice...will be adding questions on a daily basis
: midwifebiller August 27, 2011, 10:43:16 PM
Long post or not, Linda hit the nail on the head--written policies and procedures.  Find what works, create deadlines and office policies, then write everything down in a step-by-step format.  Distribute to everyone, hold multiple training meetings, let everyone know what is expected.  You will have to let some people go, there will always be the few who can't/won't change.