Electronic Remittance Advice Will Automate Your Patient Billing



Posted: Monday, May 15, 2006

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How would you like to enter payments on a vast number of patient claims in the blink of an eye? With electronic remittance advice, you can.

When looking for new practice management \ medical billing software solutions, be sure to investigate the availability electronic remittance advice for your system. Imagine the money you will save on office staff labor by reducing hours of data entry. Download an electronic explanation of benefits (EOB) file into your practice management system directly from the insurance carrier.

Most electronic remittance advice-capable systems allow you to post insurance payments and write-offs to the appropriate patient ledgers automatically. Remittance advice errors from insurers can be viewed easily with color-coded error messages that are clear and concise. Additionally, with a software solution, experienced technical support advice is never more than a phone call away.

Let’s compare the manual and automatic processes to reconciling EOBs.

Manual process:
1. Receive paper EOB and check.
2. Spend hours typing data from the EOB detail and posting payments to patient’s accounts.
3. Spend time looking for data entry errors if totals don’t add up.
4. Spend hours looking for remittance advice errors that caused denial of line items in your claim.
5. Fix all errors.
6. Write up deposit ticket by hand.

Automated process:
1. Receive electronic EOB and a paper EOB with a check.
2. Payments are posted instantly from the electronic EOB and matched against the check.
3. Instantly see any errors in red.
4. Fix errors.
5. Print auto-populated deposit ticket.

The availability of electronic remittance advice overcomes a common objection that physician’s practices billing personnel have voiced concerning paper explanation of benefits (EOBs). Historically, EOBs have come with insufficient remittance information, leading to confusion and frustration in trying to reconcile payments with submitted claims. By providing detailed electronic remittance advices, software solutions break down these traditional barriers to efficiency. Electronic remittance advice will eliminate the hand re-keying of remittance information, saving time and resources while significantly lowering your accounts receivable costs.


Lori Anderson has worked with Antek HealthWare as independent consultant from LAtech. In this capacity she has worked on Antek’s DAQbilling Medical Billing Software and LabDAQ Laboratory Information System projects. Her experience in the medical field is extensive and includes expertise in laboratory operations, billing services, and private practice operations.

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