Cost Of Keeping Billing In-House

By Tory Smith, Director, Sales & Marketing

MedHelp, Inc., Medical Management Specialists

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Cost Of Keeping Billing In-House

How many of the practices reading this article prefer to keep your billing in-house while assuming that you are saving money, have more control and believe that your staff is more than capable of handling your billing issues?

Billing and collections, particularly collections, can be an unpleasant job for those who loath being assigned to these duties. Have you ever spent money to recruit, hire and train billing and collections staff, only to find that within a very short time you have to do the same thing all over again?

Success in billing and collections requires focus and concentration. In many small practices where the staff is responsible for multi-tasking, there is no standardization in the billing and collection processes.

When the staff has time, they often work on low-hanging fruits, which are typically the most recent unpaid claims paying little regard to the outstanding A/R. Achievement in collecting from different managed care plans requires the capability of building working relationships with specific individuals at each plan who understand your practice.

The bottom-line is that you want your claims paid. If your employees tell you that they have made a call and nobody called back, you have a problem. Additionally, self-pay patients are becoming more and more important to all practices and are creating a financial headache in the process.

Outsourcing will not only reduce your A/R, but will generate more revenue sooner than you are currently doing. This allows your practice to focus on patient care, not billing and collections. A good vendor has experts in coding, management and insurance follow-up who will focus on these tasks.

Billing companies can afford to charge less because of economies of scale. Additionally, if the billing firm is able to collect more for the practice, the cost as a percentage of total collections can be less because total collections have increased.

The bottom-line is, as the owner of your practice, you will have more, not less, control over billing and collections than you would if these functions are dependent on in-house personnel who lack expertise and/or who keep leaving your practice.

Outsourcing billing and collections has definite advantages to your practice. Take the time to contact a billing company to see how they can help. Most will offer you the opportunity to conduct a cost-comparison analysis of your current operations to see what areas in which you could improve your operations.