Therapy Documentation for Medicare Reimbursements

The job of capturing all of the documentation you need for Medicare reimbursements can get complicated. It just takes one mistake in documentation or making an incomplete submission and you can be denied payment, which costs time and impacts the bottom line of your physical therapy practice significantly.

This aspect of PT practice management is so crucial that many owners of physical therapy practices have trouble finding smart and efficient people who can do it right every single time. If that's a problem and it starts to take up your time to handle this aspect of running your practice, that takes you away from the one thing you went into this career for, which is caring for your patients.

This problem can compound quickly if you own more than one physical therapy practice. If your practice or practices are growing and experiencing success, it is crucial that you come up with a solution for collecting Medicare reimbursement documentation and submitting those claims that is efficient and 100% reliable every time. The only way to achieve that objective totally is to invest in a quality form of physical therapy documentation software.

PT documentation software has the advantage of simplifying the process of collecting patient and insurance information and then integrating the use of that information across all of your documentation needs. Because the software is sensitive to the need for complete and accurate Medicare reimbursement data, the data collection screens that guide your employees through the data collection process can be dogmatic about making sure every field is completed and using software edits to cut down on errors as well.

For PT practices that implement an integrated Medicare reimbursement documentation system, the results in terms of efficiency and increased collections is striking. In some cases, practices have seen as much as a 35% increase in the level of Medicare reimbursements because of the better documentation standards being maintained by the software. That kind of billing efficiency can easily justify the cost of a quality PT practice documentation management software system.

That increase in revenue flow is only part of the picture. Because you are no longer looking to staff to maintain a high level of skill and control over your billing, the time you have to invest in handling Medicare, insurance and manual billing drops dramatically. Many practices realize savings from not having to have as much staff help, which cuts overhead significantly as well.

The improvement in efficiency and collections of Medicare reimbursements is sufficient enough justification for a documentation management software system. As the system becomes the standard for documentation management in your office, you can eventually eliminate the need for those long rows of file cabinets, because all of that data is represented in the computerized patient database. Because that data can be easily backed up and stored offsite, the security of your patient data is assured.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of implementing a reliable PT practice documentation management system is the peace of mind you will have that this aspect of your business is being taken care of well and efficiently. You can use your staff for better functions, such as patient care and other needs of the practice, and you will no longer have to live with that nagging feeling that you are losing time, money and maybe patients to an inefficient PT practice documentation management system. That peace of mind is something you cannot put a price on, but it is worth the cost of a software solution for your practice.

"We chose WebPT for its security, reliability, features, confidence in Medicare Compliance, web-based application and because it allowed us to use our iPads and be mobile"  Kenji Carp, Owner/Director, Cooperative Performance & Rehabilitation