What is the benefit of outsourcing your billing and collections?
You may be thinking that you are a relatively new consultant with not much private work so you’ll save the expense of outsourcing your medical billing and collections and do it yourself. Which of course is totally do-able and there are many consultants who do this successfully. However, our experience is that the skills of the majority of consultants lie within the clinical side of their practice and the administration and financial aspects are not where they excel and importantly enjoy.
We are seeing increasing numbers of consultants with debt levels of over £100K gained through uncollected fees over the past few years . It doesn’t take long to get to this point if you don’t have effective medical billing and collection processes and systems in place. Many consultants aren’t even aware of the level of their debt, or they believe their secretary is on top of it. The fact is that the time required to undertake effect billing and collections, and importantly to ensure that patients and insurance companies pay is greater than ever. If you want your secretary to focus on patient and clinical care and they are struggling for time, the area that is likely to be left until last is chasing of unpaid invoices.
Medical billing isn’t as straight forward as it sounds.
There are different fees for different procedures that vary by insurance company, there are often shortfalls for the patients to pay, and electronic submission of invoices sounds simple but you need all the relevant patient and procedure information for your invoices to be accepted by the insurers. And then of course there are the patients who do not pay unless they are reminded on a number of occasions.
Having a solid administration foundation that includes effective billing and collection processes is critical if you wish your practice to grow.
Ensure you and your secretary have time to focus on other important areas of developing your business. This could include areas such as website, marketing and patient care. Did you know the average consultant has between 10 and 15% of their fees unpaid? This is significantly more than the charges for outsourcing your medical billing and collection, in addition to freeing up valuable time. Many medical billing companies only charge on fees collected, ensuring it is in their interest as much as yours for them to collect all your fees. And finally, the expert medical billing companies have high collection rates, which results in a higher net income for you as their fees will easily be offset by the increased collections.
You can read more about our medical billing services here
If you would like more information about how we may be able to help your practice then please get in touch on [email protected]
Sally Barr
Managing Director
