It is no secret that the US healthcare system is overly complex. Name any other purchase or service in your life in which you are the customer, yet someone else decides how, when and where your purchase should be made. Imagine if you had a family with 5 children and needed to purchase a minivan but the dealer would only sell you a two door sedan despite your monthly and sizable contributions to a ‘car fund.’
Clearly there is a lot of bureaucracy in healthcare and despite efforts to minimize said bureaucracy, things don’t ever seem to get any easier. Anyone that has ever been a patient anywhere, ever, has surely experienced frustrating redundancy, nonsensical claim denials or excessive wait times. So anecdotally we all know that there is a lot of opportunity to fix what ills our healthcare system, but earlier this week a study sought to translate healthcare’s overwhelming administrative woes to financial burden. The bottom line? $375 BILLION dollars.
The study, recently published by BMC Health Services Research, developed a definition of and acronym for of all of this administrative overhead – ‘billing and insurance-related activities’ or BIR. The researchers found that in 2012, BIR cost the US approximately $471 billion, 80% of which was waste due to inefficiencies.
MedAptus was founded 15 years ago to focus on at least one portion of BIR – encounter coding and billing. Since getting started we have successfully moved hundreds of organizations and thousands of providers and support resources off of paper – yet groups still find themselves struggling with manual workflows to document billable patient encounters. Like we say, we aren’t a revenue cycle silver bullet and we aren’t the last technology a group will ever need, but the fact of the matter remains that over 15 years, our solutions have added millions of dollars to our customers’ balance sheets and simultaneously saved millions of dollars that were better spent delivering medical innovation than driving forms around town.
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