Centricity and Epic Billing – Why the Accounts Receivable Report is So Important

By Rahul Patel

When it comes to Centricity and Epic Billing, reports are a key barometer to understanding what’s going on in your medical practice. Without good reporting, it’s difficult to determine whether your practice is making money or not.

Monthly reports can show you how your medical practice is performing on important revenue cycle metrics, whether claims are being paid in a timely fashion, and how well insurance carriers are paying you for key procedures, among other things.

• How do you determine which are the most effective reports to run?
• How can you determine how well your individual providers are doing?
• How can you measure which insurance companies are paying you the most, or at all?
• How much money is available in patient collections? In insurance collections?

We are going to take a closer look at some of the most crucial reports we use for our medical practices. We’ve used these reports for single practitioner practices as well as larger practices with ten, twenty, or more providers. Good medical billing analytics can reveal the answers to all of these concerns and are vital to your practice’s financial health.

The Accounts Receivable Aging Report

The Accounts Receivable Aging Report indicates how long insurance claims and patient balances have been outstanding and is represented as a percentage over 120 days. The lower the percentage, the better. It’s represented in both a dollar amount as well as a percentage. With just a cursory glance at the 120 days plus column on this report, an experienced manager or billing clerk can tell whether or not a practice’s billing department is doing well.

• Is there a large dollar amount there?
• Is there a double-digit percentage outstanding?

Taking a Closer Look at the Report

Each AR report can be formatted differently, and their appearance may vary. The aging buckets may not look the same in all reporting styles. Some can carry out to 180 days or even 360 days, but they still provide all the same information.

The example provided below is broken out into the following buckets: 0-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days, 91-120 days, 121 days plus.

Your software may break it down differently. We further have separated the amounts due by patient and insurance. You can see in our example that we have both the patient and the insurance also broken out by percentages.

Typical Health 1 Accounts Receivable Aging Report. We have compared this practice’s A/R to the national standard for this specialty as compared to MGMA*.

In addition, we also include a benchmark. This benchmark is a national average against which we compare our practice’s results. This tells us how we’re doing compared to other practices around the country.

In my example here, we’re using the averages from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) who publish an annual AR benchmark report for different medical specialties. While this report must be purchased from the MGMA, Medicare (CMS) puts out a similar report that is free that can be used as a general benchmark.

In the chart above, we have the total over 120 days as compared to our benchmark. As you can see in this report, our over 120 days for both patient and insurance is 7.3% with an MGMA reported 22.3% being the average of medical practices around the country for this particular specialty. We further break down the patient over 120 days and the insurance over 120 days. Patients typically take longer to pay than insurance companies, particularly since deductibles have become significantly larger. We are working with patients more often to establish payment plans to assist with those larger deductibles.

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Taking a closer look at the numbers

The 0-30 day bucket for both the patient and insurance should be your highest totals. They’re the most current – we just submitted the claims and we’re waiting for a lot of that money.

Your next highest will be the 31-60 day totals. Typically most of the claims due will fall in the 0-60 day period.

The money in the 61-90 bucket should drop off dramatically, especially with your insurance balances. You can see in the example I’ve given here that our insurance percentage for 61-90 days has dropped to 5.5% of the total outstanding insurance balances.

The 91-120 day bucket totals should drop as we work claims, bill patients, do our follow-up, and pursue collection efforts, By running this report once a month, you can watch your progress.

Keep your percentage of 121 days or more to a minimum. Make it your goal to work these old claims hard. The older the claim the more difficult it is to collect on. The aim is to keep it in the single-digit percentages for over 120 days.

There’s always going to be some money in each of these older buckets. But the key is to make sure that the buckets in the 91-day and higher range are as low as possible. Keep working on those claims. Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up.

The AR report is only a tool. There are many other factors affecting these totals which in turn affects your practice’s Centricity and Epic Billing