Things you should know before you start your self-audit process

Why not add a title?

this lens' photo

Regular internal audits are a must for your practice if you don't want the auditor to catch you unawares when it comes knocking on your door. When you conduct regular internal audits, you'll not lose money and overlook billing mistakes that could lead to missed medical billing opportunities.

But before starting your self-audit process, you should practice these key things:

Make everyone in your practice understand why an audit is important

You should make everyone in your practice realize why an internal audit will benefit your practice. These audits are a way to ensure you're on track. By conducting internal audits you can identify opportunities for education, for the development of better forms and to tune up the practice.

In addition, internal chart audits make it possible to find and rectify medical coding errors and self report, rather than letting the payer find them. If your staff members are hesitant to participate, let them know that the point of the audit is not to search for mistakes and land people in trouble; but it's to improve coding down the line.

Choose between the two types of internal chart audits

The two types of internal chart audits are prospective audit (where your practice examines new claims before you file them) and retrospective audit (your practice examines paid claims). Your practice must determine for itself what types of audits your staff can reasonably complete and what effects on claim submission timing and cash flow the practice can handle.

Know how often your practice should perform an internal audit

One more question that you need to ask is how often your practice performs an internal audit. Here, the size and type of your practice determines how often your practice performs an internal audit. Take into consideration the amount of resources the practice can devote to the audit while conducting day-to-day office business simultaneously. The more audits your practice carries out, the cleaner your claims will be. On an average, you should conduct at least two internal audits a year. After you perform an audit, you need to define the focus of the audit.

Also determine the audit's scope

Lastly, you should also know which providers, services, date range and payers it'll address.