What is a Medical Lockbox?
Cutting costs and speeding up payments is a powerful motivator for any organization, but it is especially important for healthcare organizations. The payments landscape in the healthcare industry is uniquely complicated, and constantly changing.
Much of the complexity that plagues the healthcare payment industry stems from the wide variety of payment types and sources healthcare organizations have to deal with - from cash, check, and credit card payments from patients to more complicated receivables like explanations of benefits (EOBs), electronic remittance advice (ERAs), and ACH payments. Healthcare providers also need to manage claims and handle exceptions, resulting in a potentially slow and inefficient AR process.
On top of that, a recent study found that 87 percent of healthcare providers rely on paper and manual processes to handle their collections, leading to workflow bottlenecks and higher rates of human error.
How Medical Lockbox Simplifies Payments
Many hospitals, healthcare networks, and physician’s offices attempt to develop in-house solutions to manage their complex payment processing operations. The problem is that self-built systems like these tend to be slow and demand resources that could be better spent in other areas, like customer service or patient care.
Solutions like Exela’s Medical Lockbox are designed to replace these costly and cumbersome in-house systems and break through the complicated morass of healthcare payments infrastructure. Through digitization and automation, Exela’s Medical Lockbox centralizes all incoming receivables for healthcare providers, speeding up the payments process, increasing accuracy to avoid errors, bad debt, and write-offs, and shortening the revenue cycle, giving providers faster access to cash for greater liquidity.
Through the use of automated business rules processing, Exela’s Medical Lockbox can deliver same-day deposit and reconciliation for everything from ERAs, ACH, and checks to credit card payments, and complex explanation of benefits (EOB) statements. Plus, Medical Lockbox’s EOB to ERA conversion capability eliminates manual cash posting, making it easier for funds to auto post directly in the provider’s patient accounting system, and reduces the hassles of cash reconciliation.
Exela’s omni-channel intake of both digital and paper formats creates a complete and centralized processing system. All payments, regardless of their source, are converted into 835 electronic remittance files through automated processes that provide greater accuracy and speed than manual systems. These digital files can then be posted directly to medical billing systems, further improving turnaround time.
Paper-based payments and related documents are digitized using Exela’s in-house scanning platform. Utilizing cutting-edge intelligent character recognition (ICR) technology to extract and enrich data and provide benefits beyond what optical character recognition (OCR) tools can provide, the Exela platform transforms paper documents into fully digital assets, and is capable of handling non-standard claims and unexpected variations within claims without triggering exceptions.
Healthcare Automation Streamlines Operations
Exela has been providing lockbox services for a wide range of industries for over 30 years, we’ve used the experience to create a solution specifically designed to address the unique payment processing needs of healthcare providers. In order to offer the most comprehensive, efficient, and cost-effective lockbox solution possible for healthcare providers, we offer a number of specialized add-ons, including:
- Revenue Integrity Services
- Medical Coding
- Audit & Consultation Services
- Denial Management & Analytics
- Appeals & Grievances Services
- Medical Record Management Services
- Collections
Medical Lockbox can even provide a simpler and more streamlined workflow for addressing claims denials. Our web-based denials management tool displays the original claim and related remittance information in a single view, making it easier to determine quickly and confidently whether a claim should be adjusted, if the patient should be billed, or if the denial should be appealed. Plus, by automating processing of EOB templates, Medical Lockbox reduces the denial rate and enables clear tracking and faster denial resolutions of denials.