How Medical Billing Outsourcing Can Keep Your Practice Profitable
As a physician, you know there’s more to running a successful medical practice than providing patient care. To remain profitable and competitive, you need to be proactive about the business side of your practice, including outsourcing medical billing services. Medical billing outsourcing can help you reduce costs, streamline processes, and increase profits. In this blog, we’ll explore how medical billing outsourcing can benefit your practice and provide specific examples of increased profitability from outsourced medical billing services.
Why You Need to Outsource Medical Billing
Accurate medical billing is crucial for the revenue cycle management of healthcare organizations, as it enables you to receive the maximum reimbursement possible for your services in a timely manner. However, handling medical billing in-house can be challenging and time-consuming. It requires a deep, specialized knowledge of medical coding, billing regulations, and insurance requirements.
If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of the process, your cash flow may be interrupted, and you may be forced to deal with delays, outright denials, or partial reimbursements. Partnering with an experienced medical billing company can mitigate some of these issues.
Errors and Inaccuracies
One of the major pitfalls of doing your own medical billing is that there is a high potential for errors and inaccuracies. In fact, it’s estimated that upwards of 80% of medical bills contain errors. When medical billing is inaccurate, it doesn’t just affect your revenue cycle management—it can also impact your relationships with patients and payers and even lead to legal disputes.
In-house medical billing is particularly difficult because regulations are complex and constantly evolving. ICD-10 and CPT codes are updated annually, making it challenging for medical professionals to keep up while also focusing on patient care.
Staff Burnout
Handling medical billing in-house is a demanding task that requires a significant amount of time and attention to detail. Your stay may have to juggle multiple responsibilities, including patient care, administrative duties, or claims processing. This has the potential to cause staff burnout, which not only affects your practice’s productivity and morale but can also lead to increased turnover.
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How Medical Billing Outsourcing Streamlines Your Operations and Increases Productivity
Here are some of the key benefits of outsourcing medical billing and how it helps you run a more financially-stable healthcare organization.
Identifying Overlooked Revenue Opportunities
Outsourcing your medical billing processes is also beneficial because it allows an experienced third party to review your billing practices. This can help you pinpoint missed opportunities for savings or streamlining your operations. For example, a thorough review of your billing practices may reveal you’re missing charges or consistently under-billing certain codes. By identifying these missed opportunities, you can capture additional reimbursements that would otherwise have gone unclaimed, leading to a more profitable healthcare organization.
Furthermore, partnering with a dependable provider for medical billing outsourcing can help you
identify other flaws and areas for improvement within your billing practices. This gives you the insight you need to optimize your medical coding and documentation processes for maximum efficiency, accuracy, and profitability.
Reducing Staffing and Operational Costs
Medical billing outsourcing eliminates the need to hire, train, and retain a full-time, in-house staff to manage your billing processes, drastically reducing staffing costs. It also provides you access to automated billing technology that would otherwise be expensive to integrate and maintain, offering you a cost-effective solution to the complexities of the billing process.
By eliminating the hassle of medical billing, you can free up additional time to focus on other tasks that may better serve your patients, like clerical or administrative duties. Instead of struggling with the minutiae yourself, you can confidently offload your billing responsibilities and establish greater workforce capacity and flexibility.
Improving Cash Flow
By streamlining the process of submitting insurance claims and ensuring accuracy, outsourced medical billing services reduce the time spent waiting for reimbursements. This expedites the payment process and provides you with greater access to capital that you can use to invest in and grow your healthcare organization.
Regular Claims Follow-Up
Outsourced medical billing providers closely monitor all submitted claims to ensure that their status is always up-to-date. This includes regular follow-ups with insurance companies and payers to track the progress of payments, identify any discrepancies or errors, and resubmit claims when necessary. As a result, you can maximize your reimbursements while avoiding costly delays and denials.
Ensuring Compliance
A key benefit of medical billing services is that they can help you ensure compliance with various federal, state, and local regulations. For instance, HIPAA requires that you maintain strict standards for handling, storing, and transmitting protected patient data. Your outsourced provider uses secure software to transmit and store this information, helping you avoid costly fines due to noncompliance.
Outsourcing your medical billing also helps you comply with other relevant rules and regulations related to healthcare billing, such as Medicare/Medicaid guidelines, CMS codes and modifiers, ICD-10 requirements, or payer policies and procedures. By abiding by all relevant laws and regulations, outsourced providers help you reduce the chances of incurring penalties.
Submitting Claims On Time Without Flaws
Professional medical billing companies have dedicated teams of experts who stay up to date on the latest changes in billing and coding, such as changing codes or compliance requirements. They also use advanced automated software to streamline the billing process, ensuring that your bills are error-free and submitted within the proper window of time. By ensuring accuracy and timeliness, your medical biller optimizes your workflow and enables you to receive the maximum reimbursement possible.
