Times have changed in the billing world, as you know. Years back, regulations were steadier, and claims were denied at a significantly lower rate. Medical billing was something you could do between scheduling patients.
Now, if you don’t have a billing expert by your side, your practice could be losing tons of money.
This could mean having a biller in-house, but it’s difficult to have the right person. By ‘right’ we mean capable – medical billing is an incredibly technical profession. To give an idea – a medical biller needs to be re-certified every year, where nurses and x-ray technicians need only every other year. It’s difficult, sometimes impractical, to train a new employee in this field. Medical coding is a totally different language. Then there’s also the trust factor – after all, this is the person behind the cash flow of your practice.
However, if you aren’t in your office much, let’s say you are a neurosurgeon or an anesthesiologist, it makes hardly any sense to have an employee for billing. Or any other circumstance where you’re trying to keep low overhead, such as when you start a new practice. You’d be losing money by keeping someone on full-time.
To just make an apples-to-apples comparison, outsourcing has been found to result in overall increase to gross profits for your practice on an average of 3-5%. This is mostly attributed to the costs of keeping full-time employees, and the high ratio of reimbursements that medical billing offices are capable of.
Remember, the bottom line for a medical billing company is cash flow for its clients. So if your practice isn’t profiting, then neither are they. It is in their best interest to appeal denials rigorously, and file claims in a timely manner. You are not guaranteed this with an employee, or with multiple employees handling the responsibility.
Here is the most important point:
You didn’t get into medicine to specialize in medical billing and coding. It just comes with the responsibility of running your own practice. You got into medicine to help and heal people. And what does outsourcing your billing do? It gives you time to do what you do best – practice medicine. Less time spent billing means more patients seen.
Which, in this industry, could mean the difference in saving a life.
It’s not that you can gain buckets of money by outsourcing your billing. We aren’t saying that. What we see though, especially with neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists, is a large amount of time and money being spent on medical billing, in-house, when it isn’t necessary.
Your practice is your livelihood, and you need a medical billing expert you can trust. We’ve been doing this for 20 years – we know the language, and we know how to maintain cash flow for your practice. Contact MBA Medical to discuss how to smooth out your billing needs.