Chiropractic Billing Index Gains in February - Ninety Percent Same Membership

By Yuval Lirov

In February, the Chiropractic Office Billing Precision Index (BPI) improved by 1.5 points above its January mark. Overall, February BPI reached 17.9, 0.2 below the national average of 17.7. BPI = 17.9 means that the average of ten top performing payers working with Billing Precision clients have 17.9% of Accounts Receivable beyond 120 days.

The February index, while replacing GEICO with Medicaid Illinois, maintains the remaining membership since January, including its three lead positions, namely, Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) of Illinois and CIGNA:

Billing Precision Index 17.9 - February 2008

1. Blue Cross Blue Shield Illinois 1.9 (up from 4.7 in January)
2. CIGNA 9.8 (up from 11.8 in January)
3. Blue Cross Blue Shield New Jersey 12.4 (same score)
4. United Healthcare 15.7 (down from 14.4 in January)
5. Aetna 15.4 (down from 14.1 in January)
6. Medicare Illinois 16.4 (down from 14.9 in January)
7. Medicare New Jersey 18 (up from 21 in January)
8. Blue Cross Blue Shield Georgia 39.4 (up from 40.3 in January)
9. Blue Cross Blue Shield South Carolina 58.8 (down from 58.2 in January)
10. Medicaid Illinois 63.8

Note also that three payers improved their ranking (United Healthcare, BCBS Georgia, and BCBS South Carolina), while Aetna alone was downgraded from 4-th place to 5th, in comparison to January index.

BPI is rule-based, i.e., payer participation in the index is defined by a set of dynamic rules at the time of computation. Therefore, any specific payer may join or leave the index, dependent on satisfaction of the rule's conditions. For instance, February's BPI replaced GEICO with Medicaid Illinois.

Coverage
The Billing Precision index allows only payers that meet the minimal claims volume requirement of eight hundred claims across all providers.

Update Frequency
Billing Precision updates BPI monthly. Volume weighting accommodates future growth of provided information, index combinations, and sensitivity across multiple indices.

Information Provided
BPI computes the percent of Accounts Receivable beyond 120 days. Note that national average across all medical specialties of percent of accounts receivable beyond 120 days is 17.7%.

Summary
A simple comparison of a payer's performance metric to a national benchmark determines if that payer performs well, or not. In February, Billing Precision's performance index under performs the national average by 0.2. This approach to benchmarking also allows ranking within an entire set of payers by sorting them according to the same performance metric.

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