Five Reasons to Outsource Your Medical Billing

Today’s economic environment challenges many physician practices. As profit margins narrow and insurance companies tighten their belts, maintaining a regular inflow of revenue is more crucial than ever.Hiring a medical-billing service can make a considerable difference to a practice’s bottom line. By ensuring a steady stream of revenue, a billing service relieves stress on physicians and office staff alike. A service’s skilled medical billers optimize payments for a practice, following claims until they are reimbursed. Outsourcing your medical billing brings a host of benefits, including:•    Decreased costs: When you hire a medical-billing service, you eliminate the need to hire and pay specially trained staff. You are not required to pay for the biller’s Paid Time Off, Social Security, or other benefits, and you won’t have to find coverage when the biller takes vacation. You also avoid the expense of investing in medical-billing software. Although the billing service takes a percentage of every bill that’s reimbursed, the steady increase in payments balances out that expense.•    Reduced stress: Placing your billing in the hands of a competent service can help you breathe easier, knowing that you can stop worrying about whether you are collecting all the fees due to you. The service will perform an analysis of your fee schedule, ensuring that you are reimbursed at the highest possible rate by each insurance company.  Furthermore, using a medical billing company can allay your fears of being swindled, because the increased oversight limits the ability of a company insider to perpetrate fraud. •    Increased collection rate: A good medical-billing service regularly updates its knowledge and skill set to ensure a high rate of collections. A service monitors changes in health-care regulations, updates Electronic Medical Record software, and stays abreast of changes such as the conversion to ICD 10 (International Classification of Diseases). A professional medical biller also follows up on denials, immediately correcting errors to ensure prompt payment. •    Faster rate of collection: A quick turnaround of bills is essential for physician practices that have to pay workers’ salaries, labs, and vendors. Medical-billing services, with their single-minded focus on billing, are dedicated to efficiently submitting and collecting claims. •    Customer satisfaction: A professional medical-billing service pleases patients by assisting them with their billing questions in a courteous manner. As an additional plus, the physician and the office staffers can give more time and consideration to patient care as they are freed up from billing concerns.•    Transparency: A medical-billing service givesphysicians visibility into medical-billing operations. Upon request, a service supplies a practice with performance reports that comprehensively spell out the number of paid and unpaid claims. This allows the physician’s practice to view every aspect of the proceedings without the worry of managing them. According to a 2014 survey by Black Book, a health-care research firm, 90 percent of solo and small practices with in-house billers plan to outsource most or all of their medicalbilling within 24 months. Physicians increasingly fear that inefficient billing practices will lead to declining profits. For a growing number of them, outsourcing billing is the clear solution.