In December, the Chiropractic Office Billing Precision Index (BPI) improved improved 0.8% above its November mark. Overall, October BPI reached 18.8, 1.1 below the national average of 17.7. BPI is a key billing performance characteristic, as it is a proxy of the claims that are never paid. BPI = 18.8 means that the average of ten top performing payers working with Billing Precision clients have 18.8% of Accounts Receivable beyond 120 days.
The December index, just like November and October indices, maintains both its membership and the two lead positions: Medicare and Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS), both Illinois, have retained their September positions. The two tables below itemize the September and October indexes, including their memberships and their relative performance, as recorded in the Billing Precision's system.
- Billing Precision Index 18.8 - December 2007
- Medicare Illinois 6.8 (same position, down from 5.8 in November)
- Blue Cross Blue Shield Illinois 8.1 (same position, down from 7.9 in November)
- CIGNA 10.7 (improved position from 4, up from 15.7 in November)
- Blue Cross Blue Shield New Jersey 13.9 (improved position from 7, up from 20.7 in November)
- Aetna 14.8 (improved position from 6, up from 20 in November)
- Medicare New Jersey 18.8 (lost position from 5, up from 19.4 in November)
- United Healthcare 21.2 (lost position from 3, down from 15 in November)
- GEICO 35.2 (improved position from 9, up from 36.2 in November)
- Blue Cross Blue Shield Georgia 43.3 (improved position from 10, down from 39.9 in November)
- Blue Cross Blue Shield Pennsylvania 43.4 (lost position from 8, down rom 30.5 in November)
Coverage
BPI is rule-based, i.e., payer participation in the index is defined by a set of dynamic rules at the time of computation, rather than a static listing of specific payers. Therefore, any specific payer may start or discontinue participation in the index, dependent on satisfaction of the rule's conditions. The current selection of payers for participation in the BPI is based on one hundred top-volume providers and all payers across all United States that have processed more than six hundred claims through Billing Precision services.
Update Cycle
Billing Precision updates BPI on a monthly basis. In order to accommodate future growth of provided information, index combinations, and sensitivity across multiple indices, the Billing Precision Index employs Volume Weighting.
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
Chiropractic office managers use the rule-based index to benchmark their billing performance and guide its improvement over time. Note that a simple comparison of a payer's performance metric to a national benchmark determines if that payer performs well, or not. The rule-based approach to benchmarking also allows ranking of an entire set of payers by sorting them according to the same performance metric. Rule-based benchmarking also allows for the identification of elite payers, those that perform best in comparison to every payer in the country, as shown by the index-driven ranking. Finally, since the billing index stands for the entire set of such select participants, the number of times a given payer has participated in the monthly index determines its historic performance.
