Want Good Quality Service From A Medical Billing Company? Size Matters
It’s important to know how many physicians your medical billing company serves, because it gives you an idea of the company’s scale — and in this industry, scale is key.
For instance, If a $150,000 per year billing system administrator is required, then a medical claims billing company with 200 clients only needs each of its client to carry $750 per year of that person’s cost. If a practice of four providers employed this person, then each provider would need to carry $37,500 per year of that person’s cost; this is the value of scale. A medical practice can achieve significant advantages by leveraging the superior scale of a mid- to large-sized medical insurance billing company.
A good medical company uses resources and technology that stand-alone medical practices can’t afford to support. Here are some examples of such resources and technology:
- A state-of-the-art billing system, offering advanced reporting and claim management capabilities. Such systems are often too expensive for a small to medium sized medical practice to afford; so they select a sub-standard system that they can afford.
- A pre-submission claim scrubber that applies the payers’ adjudication rules before the claims ever leave the medical insurance billing services four walls.
- Competent billing system managers, who stay up-to-date with the regularly-changing rules used by payers. A good system manager can help you collect on claims caught up in the system because of changing rules.
- Advanced collection tools, such as predicting payment yields from patients (such as the amount the patient owes times the likelihood they’ll pay).
- Deep rosters that won’t slow down when the company loses a single employee (which most practices are likely to experience).
- A dedicated group of individuals that follow-up on claims that have not had a response from the payer within a reasonable time frame.
These and other advantages show that most medical practices can’t afford the personnel and technology to match the services that a good, properly scaled medical billing company provides.
Most of the costs of maintaining these technologies and procedures are fixed, so medical billing companies tend to distribute the costs among their clients. This is why bigger medical billing companies can afford to serve practices better than smaller ones. Smaller medical billing companies may struggle to simply keep up with developing industry technology.
In conclusion, selecting a medical claims billing company that has the scale to deploy sophisticated technology and processes can provide the average medical practice a huge advantage in terms of their ability to do battle with the payers that are working hard to keep every penny they can.
Copyright 2009 by Carl Mays II
Tags: Advice, Ask an Expert, Business, Business and finance, Business services, Business to business, Consulting, Entrepreneurship, How to, Medical billing, Medical billing services, Medical services, Outsourcing, Small-Business