As a physician, you encourage your clients to seek knowledgeable and specialized help for their health care needs.
As a physician, you deserve the same specialized care for your practice. Medical billing services become more and more complicated every year. As insurance companies strive to become more efficient, much more work is required by you and your staff.
Have you asked your staff recently what percentage of their time is spent submitting claims, resubmitting claims, and collecting your fee? For small practices where the office staff wears all the hats, medical billing services can take over 50 percent of their valuable time. Even with larger offices where there is one or more specialized medical billing staff, the service uses a lot of your resources.
Using a dedicated company to work as part of your team helps you be more efficient and leaves you with more time to see patients. But it’s not enough to work with any billing specialist. Just as physicians each have their own expertise, so do medical billing and practice management firms.
It would seem that “billing is billing” and pretty straightforward, but it’s not. We talk with physicians and practice management staff every day, so we hear the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Physicians are calling us and asking us for help, especially those who feel “handcuffed” after purchasing an over-promised and under-delivered EMR system. Three months after the purchase, they feel stuck with whatever billing company they’re attached to with the EMR system. They have no relationship with their billing partner, they can’t meet with them in person (or even get good advice over the phone), and worse, their cash flow isn’t flowing.
This theme has come up repeatedly and it saddens us because no one wins in this situation. This is one of the reasons we have taken a neutral stance (Switzerland if you will), to offer billing and/or EMR packaged together or separately. Or ala-carte—our billing system with a competitors EMR. Yes, you read that correctly. We often recommend other EMR solutions when that is what is best for the physician. It’s also why EMR software companies recommend our billing engine be used with their EMR, even though their software already has one! Our philosophy is that the only thing that matters is what is right for the physician and his/her staff.
Take your own advice and seek out the best "specialist" for your practice’s needs. Make sure you take the time to diagnose and choose a quality partner for your medical billing service so you can return to the joy of practicing medicine.
If we can help or just be a sounding board, contact us and let's talk.
Leave a Reply