Health care billing is a nasty, convoluted animal. There are hundreds of different insurance plans, from Medicare and Medicaid to private companies and HMOs, and all of those insurance plans have different health care billing requirements. And making a mistake on even one of those requirements can cost you a pretty penny.

For Medicare alone, the violation of a single billing standard can get you slapped with a fine of $100 to $25,000 a year. The best way to ensure your employees don't make mistakes is to get them trained, but training in the area of health care billing is sadly lacking. It's not something that's offered by most colleges or continuing education courses, so it's up to you to make sure your employees get the information they need.

One way to do this is to build a billing training course. It's a lot of work, but in the long run, it could save your business a lot of money. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Find your focus

There are many, many different aspects of health care revenue cycle, and it's impossible to cover them all in one course. Break down the revenue cycle processes and create a course for each aspect so that you can avoid confusion.

Do you want to give new employees a general overview of the revenue cycle and how it works, or is information about patient access and demographics more important? What about health insurance, coordination of benefits, or collection and payment?

Any one of those topics would be plenty for a single training course. Don't get distracted by including information that doesn't relate to the topic. There's a lot to teach your employees, and they don't have time to read unnecessary data.

Insurance: In case stuff happens

Consider the different insurance plans you are going to be billing. They may each require different information from other payers, so you need to get the right things from your patients. Ask yourself, "What insurance plans do we see most often?" Then compile all their billing requirements and standards into courses for each payer.

Don't forget to cover mistakes

Although training will hopefully reduce the number of mistakes, human error will still happen. Having a course that covers what to do in case of mistakes in different areas of the revenue cycle will be surprisingly beneficial.

More training course goodies

If you compile your course in PowerPoint, you can convert it to Flash using a program like Swift Presenter. Once it's in Flash, you can distribute the program to your employees using a learning management system.

You can even add assessment quizzes at the end of each course, to measure learning retention. This has an added bonus of being able to record the scores online, which means you can see which employees have completed the courses and how well they understood the information.

Help your employees and your bottom line

In a business where even the most minor mistake can cost you time and money, it's important to make sure your employees are both knowledgeable and up-to-date with the information they need. Health care revenue cycle training courses could help you solve a lot of problems. With a small time and money investment in acquiring or creating the courses, you could end up saving yourself a lot of money.

Preston Stiner is the president of Evolve e-Learning Solutions, a solutions provider of e-Learning systems and programs. They offer customers best-of-breed solutions to meet their training needs. The Revenue Cycle Education Program covers every aspect of the health care billing cycle. Don't let procrastination cost you more money in billing mistakes. Visit Revenuecycletraining.com, a service of Evolve e-Learning Solutions, today.