Parents sending a child off to college for the first time deal with a mixed set of emotions. Worries about sending their child away without supervision arise, but they also realize the potential benefits a college education provides. Deciding whether to keep your billing in-house or have it outsourced is a similar ordeal.
The worry comes from losing direct oversight of your billing. It’s a natural reaction considering that effective billing is the foundation of your revenue stream. But outsourced billing provides numerous benefits that simply can’t be realized by keeping it in-house.
Reduced Paperwork
A QuantiaMD and CareCloud study of over 5,000 physicians called the Practice Profitability Index (PPI) revealed that 60% of physicians spend more than one day a week on administrative-type tasks such as billing. By outsourcing billing, all of your billing related administrative tasks go out the window.
This is time that can be utilized for more important and profitable endeavors, namely spending more time treating patients. The upcoming influx of patients due to the Affordable Care Act makes freeing up time to treat patients more important than ever.
The PPI reveals that 48% of physicians aren’t equipped to handle this increase in patients, but by getting you back to patient treatment, outsourcing will leave you better equipped than they are.
Increased Simplicity
The study also showed that 50% of practices are looking to streamline their billing processes. Well, there’s no better way to streamline your billing than outsourcing.
When you outsource billing there’s no need to maintain a billing staff and deal with all the complexities that come with it. This includes determining salaries, bonuses, and benefits. Billing companies typically ask for a percentage of your collections, which is the only sort of payment you’ll have to worry about.
Also, with in-house billing, you must continuously provide staff training on the ever-changing billing rules and procedures. And more training than ever will soon be needed with the upcoming ICD-10 implementation.
Minimized Error
When you outsource billing, you enter into a contractual agreement with a billing company, and they are expected to achieve a certain level of performance. This means they want to perform their best so that you remain a customer. By doing your research and finding the right billing company, your errors will decrease.
And even if the company does commit an error it won’t cost your practice anything extra. The average claim denial costs practices $25 to $30 each, even if a resubmittal is approved. But when outsourcing, you don’t incur the costs of finding the error and resubmitting. The billing company has to deal with these added expenses itself.
Just make sure to request performance reports so you can ensure no errors are being made without resubmittal since that would decrease your returns.
Outsourcing your billing is a beneficial trade off. Yes, you lose some control, but you stand to gain more in return. If you’re looking for a relatively quick and easy way to improve your practice, outsourcing is worth a look.
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