Why Doctors Should Outsource
Outsourcing can seem like a touchy subject and you might even feel like it is a cost. But when you step back and take a look at what it costs your practice to run all of the operations yourself, that can be a cost as well, even though it may be hard to put a dollar value to it.
Billing is the most important aspect of any practice. Yet sometimes billing becomes an afterthought. Scheduling patients, pulling charts, answering phones...you get the picture. Everything that happens on a day to day basis can cause paperwork to be pushed to the side to be taken care of later. This can be a cost to you when this happens with your billing. Timely filing rules with insurance carriers, the cost of floating money that could be in your bank account, that is a cost. A professional medical billing company is a specialist whose sole responsibility is keeping your cashflow positive.
Think about the technology cost aspects of billing as well. With the ever changing nature of medical billing, there can be a significant cost to your practice as well. Software purchases and updates, compliance systems...these can add up. When you outsource your billing, you pass the cost of technology off to the billing company who is able to spread their cost across several practices.
How about everyone's favorite task? Following up on insurance denials. In many practices that I speak with, this is one of the last things to get attention. It is time consuming, it can be frustrating and confusing, and as a result denials can slip through the cracks. It is not uncommon these days for a practice to have 30% or more of their claims denied. A lot of that just gets written off. Why? Insurance carriers are constantly changing rules. Visit Medicare's website...ever try to find why your claim denied by searching the CMS website for that one specific nugget of information? If you could put a dollar value to the cost to your practice just for denials and all of the follow up involved, what do you think that would be worth?
A professional medical billing company does all of that work for you. Better yet, a billing company that works on a contingency basis ( charging a percentage of monies collected ) has more of an incentive to collect your money than an office staffer paid by the hour.
Many physicians code their own charts as well. This can be very time-consuming, preventing you from scheduling and seeing more patients. Errors can occur as well, even if you use software. Coding programs don't always get updated resulting in incorrect coding of claims. As of October 2013, healthcare providers will be required to be using ICD-10 codes. How much more time consuming will that be when diagnosis codes go from around 17,000 to 150,000? Outsourcing coding may seem like a cost, but there is a dollar value to the work you do as well. What pays you more? Doing work that someone making $10, $15, $20 per hour can do ( coding ) or seeing patients?
For more information on why it benefits doctors to outsource systems that can be done at a lower cost by others, read this article from BC Advantage, "Why Doctors Should Outsource Their Billing."
Billing is the most important aspect of any practice. Yet sometimes billing becomes an afterthought. Scheduling patients, pulling charts, answering phones...you get the picture. Everything that happens on a day to day basis can cause paperwork to be pushed to the side to be taken care of later. This can be a cost to you when this happens with your billing. Timely filing rules with insurance carriers, the cost of floating money that could be in your bank account, that is a cost. A professional medical billing company is a specialist whose sole responsibility is keeping your cashflow positive.
Think about the technology cost aspects of billing as well. With the ever changing nature of medical billing, there can be a significant cost to your practice as well. Software purchases and updates, compliance systems...these can add up. When you outsource your billing, you pass the cost of technology off to the billing company who is able to spread their cost across several practices.
How about everyone's favorite task? Following up on insurance denials. In many practices that I speak with, this is one of the last things to get attention. It is time consuming, it can be frustrating and confusing, and as a result denials can slip through the cracks. It is not uncommon these days for a practice to have 30% or more of their claims denied. A lot of that just gets written off. Why? Insurance carriers are constantly changing rules. Visit Medicare's website...ever try to find why your claim denied by searching the CMS website for that one specific nugget of information? If you could put a dollar value to the cost to your practice just for denials and all of the follow up involved, what do you think that would be worth?
A professional medical billing company does all of that work for you. Better yet, a billing company that works on a contingency basis ( charging a percentage of monies collected ) has more of an incentive to collect your money than an office staffer paid by the hour.
Many physicians code their own charts as well. This can be very time-consuming, preventing you from scheduling and seeing more patients. Errors can occur as well, even if you use software. Coding programs don't always get updated resulting in incorrect coding of claims. As of October 2013, healthcare providers will be required to be using ICD-10 codes. How much more time consuming will that be when diagnosis codes go from around 17,000 to 150,000? Outsourcing coding may seem like a cost, but there is a dollar value to the work you do as well. What pays you more? Doing work that someone making $10, $15, $20 per hour can do ( coding ) or seeing patients?
For more information on why it benefits doctors to outsource systems that can be done at a lower cost by others, read this article from BC Advantage, "Why Doctors Should Outsource Their Billing."
Labels: medical billing, medical coding, outsource medical billing
posted by Jeffrey Roh at
3:27 PM
