The Benefits of Outsourcing Your Medical Billing
As a medical practice, you focus first and foremost on providing exceptional patient care. However, you also need to ensure that all the administrative elements function smoothly behind the scenes – including your billing processes. Managing medical billing in-house requires dedicated staff, ongoing training, and specialized software systems.
For many practices, the overhead costs and complexities of running billing operations internally are not the best use of resources. That’s where outsourcing your medical billing to a third-party specialist can offer valuable benefits. Here are some key ways outsourcing billing can improve your practice’s bottom line and service delivery.
Reduced Costs
One of the biggest pluses of outsourcing is reducing operational expenses. By partnering with a billing company, you eliminate the need to employ full-time billers, coding staff, insurance specialists, and bill collectors internally. You also avoid hardware and software system costs to run billing operations. On average, practices save 20-30% annually by outsourcing versus handling billing in-house.
Improved Cash Flow
Professional medical billing companies employ certified coders, billers, and revenue cycle specialists focused solely on maximizing reimbursements and speeding payments. Their expertise and industry relationships mean faster insurance approvals, fewer rejected claims, and less payment delays. Improved cash flow is critical for covering operating expenses and future growth plans.
Compliance Expertise
Staying abreast of the latest regulatory changes and insurer policies is a full-time job in itself. Billing services have entire compliance departments dedicated to interpreting rules, ensuring proper coding and documentation, and overseeing audits. Outsourcing removes compliance risks and potential penalties from underbilling or fraudulent activities.
Focus on Patient Care
When billing is handled externally, your clinical staff can focus 100% of their time on direct patient care, treatment, procedures etc. They don’t need to spend hours per week doing data entry, following up on delayed claims, or dealing with insurer gripes. This improves quality of care and patient satisfaction.
Scalability
As your practice expands services or adds providers, onboarding and properly training new billing staff takes time and resources. A billing company can instantly scale up their services to fit your growing needs with no disruption. Changes to staffing levels or service capacity is their responsibility.
Technology & Expertise
Billing experts have access to industry-leading software, such as EHR integration platforms and cloud-based billing/coding systems. Their size also allows for specialized roles like credentialing experts, CPT coding specialists, clinical documentation improvement analysts, etc. Leverage their revenue cycle technology investments and enhanced processes.
In summary, outsourcing your medical billing unlocks compliance guidance, boosted revenues, reduced costs, scalability, and the ability for your staff to solely focus on high-quality clinical work. It removes administrative hassles so you can run a financially stable practice and meet your priority of serving patients.