Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Why Should You Outsource?
Benefits to Using a
Claims Processing Service
vs. Doing It Ourselves...
- No more dealing with insurance company personnel or bureaucrats with Medicare and Medicaid. In many areas the average length of employment for the people who handle your claims is less than 6 months. This means that low-wage, untrained people are determining whether or not you get your money, and how soon you get it. With our service, all claims are handled electronically, by-passing the human “gate-keepers” and turning your claims around in 10 to 21 days rather than the national average of 270 days for Medicare/Medicaid and 58 days for commercial claims.
- No more wasted time spent by the doctor in supervising the processing of claims. Many doctors spend as much as two hours per day working on insurance claims. The amount of money lost by not seeing patients during this time can be far, far greater than the entire cost of an outside service.
- No more problems with office software and hardware support and service. Many doctors that have purchased internal software systems (whether cheap or expensive) have difficulty getting good service, support, software updates, consulting, etc. from their software distributor or vendor. Every bad experience your office has with software and hardware dealers adds another reason for you to try our service!
- Greater income from increased efficiency of claims collections. Many doctors will experience an increase in collections of twenty to thirty percent, or more, within a short period of time after starting to use an outside service such as ours.
- Cost savings. A great many internal billing operations, like most bureaucracies, can be found to be very inefficient and actually more expensive than an outside service would be to perform the same functions (and get them done better and faster). A recent survey performed on practices all over the country that was published in Medical Group Management Journal showed that the average cost of internal billing departments was 11% of the practice’s income. Billing centers typically charge only 5 to 9% to perform the same functions. Further, the same study showed that the collection rate of these internal operations was a dismal 55% and that it took an average of 93 days to collect insurance claims. Many times, a professional can actually do the job less expensively than the current staff.
- Increased office space. It is not uncommon to find doctors that, even though their practices may have outgrown their available facilities, are “locked in” on long-term leases of five to seven years. Utilizing a billing center can sometimes free up one or more rooms that can then become remodeled into new income-producing examining or testing areas.
- A professional who can help the doctor stay up with the latest changes in regulations, technology, etc. With all the political focus on Healthcare, and the talk of changes in various government and insurance systems, many doctors are beginning to find billing centers a welcome solution that allows them to “wash their hands” of all the administrative details involved in handling relations with insurance companies and government agencies. Thus, doctors find they can concentrate more fully on what really makes them money: treating patients and practicing medicine.
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