HIPAA-Compliant Outsourced Medical Billing Data Entry: a Game Changer

Providing quality patient care and timely disbursement of medical benefits is the core essence of the healthcare industry. The first and primary stage is the billing process which needs to be super-fast and powerful enough to ensure quick benefit disposal.

Most efficient healthcare service providers rely on the HIPAA-compliant outsourced Medical Billing Data Entry process for this. It has revolutionized their entire service delivery ecosystem. From managing the in-house operations to the overall organization’s reputation, it has increased value everywhere.

Let’s expose the untold benefits of outsourcing medical data entry services and the relevance of HIPAA in this blog.

HIPAA ensures the complete protection of patient data and sets strict guidelines for handling personal health information (PHI). This code has strictly defined storing, sharing, and processing of PHI details. So, failure of compliance directly enables several legal penalties and erodes patient trust. But that is not your goal. Right?

Think about the bigger picture…

Protection of personal medical data is extensively crucial. If PHI gets misused then it will create blunders! Historically, we have seen such incidents before where health information was doctored to create fake identities and cause monetary losses.

Anyway, while handling PHI or any data related to health, you need to follow HIPAA guidelines. Even if you outsource your medical data entry needs, you have to ensure that your vendor strictly follows the HIPAA.

Obeying the HIPAA guidelines helps healthcare organizations comply with the laws. The guidelines have many attributes which all you need to accomplish to fulfill the criteria. When you delegate your data to any professional medical data entry service provider, you must check them.

Secure FTP: Before transferring data to the outsourcing company, you must encrypt your data. Having a secure File Transfering Protocol (FTP) eliminates unauthorized access while transferring the data.

Access Control: Check whether only the authorized person is working with the sensitive patient information or not. If not, you must ensure strict authentication measures to gain access control.

Secure Storage: After completion of the task, the file should be transferred via the same FTP with encrypting format. For storing sensitive information, you can take the help of a medical electronic record system process. It ensures complete protection of your data in each stage of processing and storage.

Regular Audits: Checking whether the system is compliant or not to protect sensitive information is important. Thus, performing regular audits can help at this stage. Before you outsource, ask this thing to your vendor.

Well, that is the most common thing!

Healthcare organizations are busy with the delivery of care. Processing healthcare data, handling bills and insurance, and other data-related work are nonessential for them. So when there is a limit within the in-house team, you can obviously delegate it to any professional outsourcing company.

But please ensure that the outsourcing company is compliant with HIPAA. For your reference, we also provide HIPAA-compliant medical data entry services with expertise. You can try us also if you looking for a reliable plus long-term connection.

Deciding to outsource your needs is only a half part of the story. Finding a good outsourcing partner completes it.

Here we have pointed out a few things (only a few things) that you must check before you send your work to any outsourcing team.

With a generic data entry idea, you can accomplish only certain medical tasks. For intense medical data entry tasks like processing CMS-1500 forms or UB-04 forms, you need domain expertise. With the experience of processing these forms, the team can reduce errors in work.

Many service providers only show off the certificate but the genuine ones follow the rules of HIPAA seriously. Choose a provider that regularly trains their employees about new data rules. This will make sure that your medical data is in the right hands.

Initiate a detailed inquiry about the security protocols that the outsourcing company has. Ask them about the FTP protocols, encryption, and also about their disaster recovery plans. After ensuring all these vital aspects then only decide.

Delegating to an outsourcing partner for medical data entry work is definitely a strategic step. Besides cost-saving, it drives accuracy and efficiency in your healthcare operations. But the biggest thing is somewhat different and that is HIPAA compliance. Mostly outsourcing providers take care of HIPAA compliance through their medical data entry work. So, the foremost thing when you outsource is to ensure that your partner data entry company follows the HIPAA guidelines completely.