6 ways to reduce claim denials in your practice

Claim denials keep getting harder to ignore. The Medical Group Management Association's 2026 Regulatory Burden Report ranked Medicare Advantage denials, audits and appeals among the top regulatory pain points for physician practices, and recent industry surveys put average denial rates above 10% across the board. For a typical midsize group, every percentage point of unworked denials can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in delayed or written-off revenue each year.

The pressure is unlikely to ease in the near term. Payer scrutiny continues to tighten, automated payer-side claim edits are catching more low-level mismatches than ever, and the patient-responsibility share of total practice revenue keeps climbing alongside high-deductible plan enrollment. Practices that wait for the appeals queue to grow before acting will spend more time chasing money they have already earned.

The encouraging news is that most denials are preventable. A consistent body of revenue cycle research traces roughly 60% to 70% of rejections to front-end issues such as eligibility errors, missing prior authorizations and patient demographic mistakes. That gives practices a clear lane to recover revenue without rebuilding the billing department from scratch. Here are six places to start.