Why does my practice need a medical billing company?

In our country, a medical billing service is the intermediary between a doctor and his payments. However, while the Health IT sector is flourishing, many providers are missing out on even greater revenues in the form of quicker claim processing and reimbursements. Can a medical billing company be that intermediary; a question on the lips of all providers.

Managing your practice is not a walk in the park with doctors having to manage their patients and in addition to working towards achieving Meaningful Use incentives and avoiding penalties, the ICD-9 coding process and the fear of the fast approaching ICD-10 diagnostic codes among other things.

How can an in-house biller or professional billing company change the doctor’s revenue cycle? The answer is simple; through the internet, the intermediary transmits insurance claims directly to the insurance. Yes there is a clearinghouse involved, but that’s for the biller to worry about. As a provider, you have one less aspect to manage.

In addition, Medicare prioritizes electronically submitted claims. Claims transmitted online take 10 to 14 days for payment, in contrast to paper-based claims, which can take approximately 27 days. With so many days saved, even more money is earned by the doctor.

Now comes the next question, in-house or outsourcing medical billing? There’s a pretty straightforward self-evaluation statement for this. With both avenues providing the same service; would you prefer dedicated billing staff, to which you’d have to allocate a separate room and computers? Or would you prefer a company with numerous billing professionals, who’d do everything to maximize your reimbursements, and who’d charge an extremely low percentage of your annual revenues for their services? 

The more practical choice would be to outsource your billing to a company who’d do all this for you, all without taking a large amount of space and money to carry out your services for you. Additionally, most EHR vendors offer to execute this service for you, which means that you don’t even have to worry about system compatibility issues.