Thanks to the zooming prices of healthcare in the US, it is rather impossible to walk into a hospital complaining of some ailment unless you have health insurance to back you up. While most people in the rest of the countries save for new homes, cars, and gadgets, most people in the US save for imminent surgeries that will save their lives.
The most frustrating part comes when people are faced with nightmare-invoking hospital bills. In most cases, patients don’t even know what services they are paying for. This is not just discouraging for patients, it is detrimental to the image of hospitals and doctors as well. This is where the importance of the roles of the medical billing professionals comes in.
How has technology become a part of healthy living?
Earlier people had to make an appointment with their doctors and wait till they were available to get their regular checkups. These expenses also needed to be included in the claims at times and even that ensured a lot of hassle. Now, with the evolution of electronic medical aid and medical apps, maintaining a healthy lifestyle at a sustainable cost has become increasingly feasible. Here are a few examples:
- Bio-monitors – these can be mobile applications that maintain a log of your regular bodily functions and vital statistics. You can maintain the charts on a regular basis and share the same with your doctors without as much as a physical visit. These charts can be sent via electronic mail or shared on cloud for direct expert consultation. There are online medical forums where doctors confer with each other to diagnose and treat challenging cases. You can share your reports with such online medical communities for expert medical opinion without paying a dime.
- Wearables – these include the much lauded FitBits and smartwatches like the ones from Samsung and LG. These have the power to monitor your heart rate and body temperature in real-time. You can count the number of steps you have walked each day and the amount of calories you have burned based on your day’s activity. The apps made for these gadgets give you a 360-degree view of your health status, and enable you to share the same with your physicians.
- Mobile applications – almost 90 percent of the people in the US have smartphones and smartwatches. So getting access to mobile applications that monitor your health and habits is no real challenge at all. There are mobile apps that work as medicine reminders and appointment schedulers, and then there are others that help you regulate special diets required for specific health conditions. The mobile applications help people to stay in touch with healthy living options and keep updating the subscribers with recent discoveries about health and medicine.
- Fitness gadgets – you can bring the power of a complete medical lab into the confines of your living room with the help of these fitness gadgets. While there are some that can analyze your blood testosterone, Vitamin D and fertility levels from nasal and mouth swabs, there are others that identify the quality of air you are breathing every day. This one in particular has the ability to tell humidity levels, temperature and pollution levels to keep you breathing easily and sleep better. There are similar devices made for sleep apnea patients. The use of such pocket sized sleep monitors, breathing monitors and dream pattern analyzers help patients every day to get the needed quota of sound sleep.
How has technology reduced insurance costs?
In the last 40 years healthcare costs have been increasing at a rate of 9.8 percent. This is about 2.5 points faster than the GDP of the country. It has been a serious concern for many decades, but with the advent of mobile healthcare, it looks like the health expenses can finally be tamed.
Most current health insurance systems cover the cost of new age treatments and surgeries, but the premiums are sky-high. It is becoming impossible for the common man to seek quality healthcare without compromising their family finances. The situation has become quite dismal as healthy living is gradually being categorized with luxury rather than human right.
But as the medical apps and gadgets are evolving to become a part of the mainstream life of Americans, they are being introduced to a new world of health options that do not require paying thousands every year to insurance companies. These gadgets, apps and techs offer free services without going into the hassle of medical billing and coding. Medical billing is being restricted only to the in-house treatments and procedures that involve doctors’ services and staying at the hospital.
The role of electronics and technology in medical billing
Medical billing does not involve doctors and medical assistants staying up at night, filling up paperwork for insurance companies anymore. It is a much integrated and wholesome process thanks to medical technology and apps. Patients and doctors can update their treatment statuses, diagnostics costs and other medical costs in real-time to their accounts. The same data is verified by billing experts who place the claim with the respective insurance companies.
To make the billing process as accurate and a little more cost effective, many hospitals and large healthcare organizations mostly outsource their work to bill a medical – anesthesia services. This has become more of a mainstream practice after October 2015 when ICD-10 coding replaced ICD-9. ICD-10 is much more intricate and requires the attention of coding experts to foresee the correct application of codes.
Technology has reached it crescendo, and at this point, we can wholeheartedly trust our health and wellbeing on the futuristic electronic gadgets like these. More than just treating a specific condition, these innovations take a holistic approach towards helping people achieve better health with a few easy steps. From diet monitors to needle-free glucose monitors, we have it all within our reach. They eliminate the necessity of fixing up face-to-face appointments with our doctors for small ailments like the flu, allergies, rashes or cough-and-cold to a great extent.
Author Bio: Carl M. Finn is a medical software advice expert. He was worked in the sphere of medical billing and insurance claim for over 10 years. He answers how to bill a medical – anesthesia servicesand how to get your pending insurance claim in his blogs for fans and fellow experts.