Patient Account Representative - Medicine - Surgery

Position Objective:

The Patient Account Representative works in the Central Billing Office (CBO) providing billing services such as the processing and submission of patient charges and appropriate follow up with insurance companies and patients. The Patient Account Representative provides outstanding service to both internal and external customers utilizing the telephone as their primary source of communication.

Essential Job Duties:

Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions

1. Demonstrates Proficient Use of Practice Management Software: Efficient utilization of billing system database to update facility file and patient demographic information; assures correct balance of charge and payment batches, bank deposits, and proper reconciliation.  Ability to edit a claim and send/receive claim notes in the billing system.
2. Competence with Insurance Issues: Demonstrated ability to post charges, payments, adjustments, and knows how to work unpostables.  Understands the credit, collection, and zero pay work lists and knows how to effectively use them.  Demonstrates the ability to understand and utilize kick codes correctly and shows competence with coding knowledge.
3. Organization Efficiency: Effectively maintains collections and follow up account activity by ensuring the proper organizations, tracking, filing and documenting of all correspondence. 
4. Demonstrated ability to utilize Outlook email and navigate in the Word and Excel software applications.
5. Demonstrates Competence with the Collection Process: Responds to patient billing and insurance inquiries and facilitates resolution of financial issues promptly.
6. Demonstrates basic knowledge in interpreting and understanding billing slips and the Athena workflow dashboard.
7. Business Operations: Accurately completes payment/deposit batches with proper allocation of monies. Completes and understands month end productivity and statistical reports. Understands applicable financial policies to include cash discounts, payment plans, sliding fee schedule, etc. Reviews patient invoices and claims for accuracy and completeness before submission.
8. Provides Outstanding Customer Service: Prepares account history information for physician review and/or transfer to collection agency.
9. Answers patient calls in a professional and timely manner, projecting proper telephone etiquette; understands when it is acceptable to release patients protected health information.

10. Business Conduct: Displays professionalism in the workplace maintaining a positive team attitude; demonstrates dependability through perfect attendance and reliability via non-existent tardiness.

Educational/Experience Requirements:

• High school diploma or GED
• Two to four years of billing experience including ICD9, CPT coding and medical terminology or related experience. Experience operating multi-line phone system, fax machine, photocopier, and PC. Experience with Microsoft Office, Word and Excel. Ability to communicate professionally via internet. Ability to operated PC efficiently and type 40 wpm.

Required License/Certifications: 

• None

Working Conditions, Equipment, Physical Demands:

There is a reasonable expectation that employees in this position will not be exposed to blood-borne pathogens.

Physical Demands -

The physical demands and work environment that have been described are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The above job description is an overview of the functions and requirements for this position.  This document is not intended to be an exhaustive list encompassing every duty and requirement of this position; your supervisor may assign other duties as deemed necessary.