Anyone interacting with the American healthcare system is certain to encounter examples of unnecessary administrative complexity ranging from filling out duplicate intake forms to transferring records between multiple providers to sort out insurance bills. The high cost of healthcare administration is often cited as one of the main reasons that the United States spends nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other high-income countries.
In fact, the administrative costs of American medicine alone would rank the US as having the costliest healthcare system on the planet. The US spends more on billing and insurance-related costs than any other country’s total budget for healthcare.
The Center for American Progress estimates that billing and insurance alone cost healthcare providers $496 billion per year. A 2010 report by the National Academy of Medicine estimates that US healthcare providers spend about twice as much as necessary on insurance and billing-related costs. That excess spending would amount to about $248 billion a year.
Of course, the burden of insurance and billing-related costs to individual primary care practices doesn’t reach billions of dollars per year. There is considerable variability in the duties and compensation of physician office staff, but it is not unreasonable to expect a small practice billing a million dollars a year to spend $50,000 to $70,000 a year to hire a single skilled administrator.
Those administrators not only have to navigate the demands of CMS and HIPAA rules, but they must also be able to deal with situations that lead to headlines like these:
- HHS Office of Civil Rights Advises Checking Legacy IT Systems for Compliance
- 42% of Healthcare Providers Have Not Developed a Data Breach Plan
- FBI: Ransomware Gangs Monitor Financial Events of Primary Care Providers to Time Demands
- 5 Healthcare Providers Fall Victim to Ransomware Attacks
- Two Printing Companies Fined $130,000 for HIPAA and CFA Violations (The printing companies inadvertently released patient names, healthcare provider names, and descriptions of services provided. Physician offices were considered for shared liability.)
- 58% of Healthcare IT Professionals Say Their Organizations Have Experienced a Ransomware Attack in Last Twelve Months
- HHS: Most Ransomware Attacks Reportable Breaches Under HIPAA
It isn’t enough anymore to be able to navigate the complex rules of insurance reimbursement. It isn’t enough to maintain the highest standards of HIPAA compliance in everything your practice does. You now must secure your systems against outside bad actors who break HIPAA and CMS rules for you.
Or you can rely on CareCloud.
CareCloud Charts is the leading secure electronic health records (EHR) solution. It combines the benefits of seamless EHR, robust medical billing, and meaningful practice management. CareCloud Charts facilitates paperless information flow to streamline the administration of your practice.
CareCloud Charts is Meaningful Use (MU)-Certified. Its detailed reporting features track your practice’s progress to MU attestation. CareCloud Charts provides templates for reporting, billing, and prescription that can be customized to the needs of your practice.
The CareCloud dashboard displays complete patient information from booked appointments to medical history on a single screen. It allows clinics to streamline records from patient activities to billing.
And CareCloud secures data with 256-bit SSL encryption. That’s twice the level required in government mandates. It makes patient data hard to steal and harder to take for ransom. CareCloud is very proud of the great lengths they go to protect their customer’s valuable data.
CareCloud Health Inc. also provides a HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform, CareCloud Live. With CareCloud Live, practitioners can engage with their patients by real-time video safely and efficiently from their laptops or with the mobile app on their iOS devices. CareCloud Live is built with the same features that all CareCloud systems provide to relieve your administrative burden.
