How Do ERAs, EDI and EFTs Affect Your AR Turnover by AMPM
Employment of ERAs, EDI and EFTs can have a dramatic effect on your AR Turnover Rate. To understand this, lets first review what all three are and what their benefits are.
What’s an ERA? Electronic Remittance Advice – the ERA replaces the traditional EOB (Explanation of Benefits) that comes by mail. Most ERAs are available for download through your insurance carrier’s website or heathcare portals like NaviNet: http://www.navinet.net/ , Availity: http://www.availity.com/ and AHIN: https://secure.ahin-net.com and InstaMed. You can also get ERA’s sent to you along with your EDI reports via your billing software.
What are the benefits of ERAs? There are many benefits of ERAs. ERAs are time and space savers. Office staff has less mail to process and less paperwork to store. ERAs are downloaded in PDF format and stored electronically. Files are quickly retrieved without having to leave workstations, office space is not cluttered with filing cabinets full of paper and rarely is there an issue with misfiled documents. Depending on your software, an ERA can be programmed to auto-post payments and adjustment.
What is EDI? Electronic Data Interchange. This is the electronic exchange of claim information. Claims that are sent electronically get EDI reports. These reports include clearinghouse acceptance reports, error reports, carrier acknowledgements and depending on the clearinghouse, ERAs too. Everyone should be submitting claims electronically!
What are the benefits of EDI? At AMPM, we can still remember the time that most claims went out by mail and when we would call on their status we would be told that there was no claim on file. Today, claims electronically submitted have an electronic footprint and allow our staff to address many claim errors within a day of submission. With a paper claim, you don’t know when it will get there and you don’t know if it has denied for demographic errors and it can take weeks before you get correspondence notifying your claim had an error.
What’s an EFT? Electronic Funds Transfer – EFTs replace paper checks. Now money can be deposited directly into your business checking account.
What are the benefits of EFTs? You get your money faster. Your staff has less mail to process daily. You have fewer bank runs.
So what is the overall benefit of ERAs, EDI and EFTs? As a billing company it allows us to operate more efficiently and improve our AR turnover rate. It allows us to submit our claims faster, confirm acceptances faster, get paid faster and store our client’s documents in an organized an easily accessible way. In fact, our AR Turnover Rate has dramatically been reduced since AMPM’s project to convert all its clients to ERAs and EFTs.
