Account receivable managment - what is task management

Task Management

Task Management is embedded within the majority of commercial practice management or receivable management systems. This methodology lifts or queues accounts within the existing accounts receivable based upon some user defined rules in order to serve up an account to be worked. For example, all surgeries for a particular physician—let’s say “Dr. Smith”—greater than 60 days old would be a task queue or segmentation of accounts to be worked. This technology is a great improvement over working a simple accounts receivable aging from highest to lowest dollar, whereby the bottom half of the list never gets touched due to the size and scope of the entire list.

Strengths

• Achieves a segmentation of the A/R to allocate among the billing staff

• Provides the billing manager with some basis of evaluating employee productivity,

efficiency, effectiveness

• Provides responsibility for a particular work queue

• Allows flexibility to create multiple queues

Weaknesses

• Tendency to have too many, duplicate queues and duplicative work

• Embedded within the system are work queues that must be updated to insure queue logic

does not omit/drop new information

• Does not segment claims production issues from receivables

• Little or no capture of denial consistency by payer, provider or procedure

• Does not provide a means to develop and implement denial action rules

• Can promote “just working an account” for work’s sake versus resolving an account; in other

words, an analyst might be more focused on touching that charge and adding notes than
collecting money, progressing its status, by identifying reasons for denials and fixing them

• Does not facilitate denial reporting to improve the entire billing process

• Little improvement in billing efficiency per full-time equivalent employee (FTE)

• A/R is dependant upon embedded PMS systems