Unless you are part of a large healthcare institution, you are most likely responsible for your medical billing, documentation, patient validation, and collections. But even with a fully trained staff, in-house medical billing can be burdensome, ultimately reducing valuable patient time. In-house billing can also result in adverse patient interactions due to collections or discrepancies.

Unsurprisingly, a growing number of medical practices opt for outside billing services. They cite time, convenience, accuracy, and compliance as primary reasons for the switch.

Benefits of Outsourcing Medical Billing

Office administrators can expect several benefits when outsourcing medical billing, such as:

• Improved Efficiency: Medical billing outsourcing companies have specialized knowledge, technology, adequate staffing, and flexible procedures designed to streamline the basic billing process, resulting in faster claims processing, fewer errors, and improved cash flow. Rather than claims sitting on a desk, delayed due to a burdensome workload, services are billed promptly.
• Optimized Revenue and Cash Flow: Timely filing is an essential aspect of successful billing. Medical outsourcing companies can speed up billing, identify and correct underpayments, and optimize coding. Billing services respond to administrative-denied claims and other billing errors, increasing revenue for services rendered.
• Reduced Administrative Burden: Outsourcing medical billing can free up staff time, enabling office administrators to focus on other essential tasks, like concentrating on the core of their business: patient care. Migration of billing duties can also help office administrators drastically reduce unnecessary overhead by eliminating the need to hire and train additional in-house billing staff or invest in billing software, infrastructure, and maintenance.
• Compliance with Regulations: The legal and policy landscape within the insurance industry changes daily. Medical billing outsourcing companies have the capacity and resources to stay updated with evolving regulations and credentialing requirements, ensuring that the practice remains compliant with current regulations.
• Better Patient Satisfaction: Medical consumers have a growing number of care choices. Migrating in-house billing services helps a practice stay competitive and improves the patient experience by reducing billing errors, improving communication, and streamlining the payment process.

Outsourcing medical billing benefits healthcare practices significantly, enabling them to deliver patient-centric care. But what is the best way to choose an outsourcing partner, and which are the most essential services required for success?

Choosing Outsource Billing Services

Deciding to outsource billing services has many advantages. For one thing, it can help streamline a healthcare provider’s billing processes and reduce costs by minimizing the need for ongoing training or on-site technology. Outsourcing medical billing also supports practice profitability by reducing mistakes resulting from outdated information, incorrect coding, missed filing deadlines, or human error. Most third-party billing offerings are flexible, offering scalable products and programs that change to meet the practice’s needs.

Off-site medical billing from third-party firms provides endless, quantifiable benefits to healthcare providers, including:

• Coding and Technological Expertise: Outsourcing billing services to a specialized company can give healthcare providers access to highly skilled billing professionals knowledgeable about medical billing codes, regulations, and requirements. With today’s constantly changing regulatory environment, this can result in more accurate billing and higher reimbursement rates while minimizing complex and ongoing training needs.
• Validating Missing Information to Reduce Errors: Medical billing can be complex and prone to errors. Whether the missing information involves patient-specific details, underutilized coding specificity, or unique modifiers, outsourcing to a specialized provider can help reduce the risk of generalized errors and improve billing accuracy.
• Timely Claims Filings: An active medical practice may partner with dozens of insurers. But keeping track of their policies can be a full-time position. Each insurer has specific policies for detailing timely claims filing. A lack of understanding of these rules can have significant consequences. If deadlines are missed, billed services will not be paid. Denials will be unappealable, minimizing revenue for standard services. Outsourced billing services can reduce errors and lost revenues due to missed deadlines.
• Automatic Appeals and Denial Defense: Like missed billing, the denied claims appeal process is costly to a thriving medical practice—in workforce hours and lost revenue. Many practitioners ignore details and accept the loss as a cost of doing business. However, a benefit of outsourcing medical billing services is the comprehensive team that guards a practice’s best interests. Denials can be automatically appealed through all stages and lost revenue recouped.
• Scalability: A tangible benefit of the decision to outsource billing services is the ability for healthcare providers to scale their billing operations up or down based on changing needs, without investing in additional resources or infrastructure.

Whether services are chosen à la carte or comprehensive, developing and outsourcing a customized medical billing program will noticeably impact daily operations. Regardless of practice size or specialty, it will provide tangible and long-lasting benefits.

Outsourcing your medical billing to StarkBilling eliminates the time-consuming process of providing continuing education to staff in order to keep up with insurance and HIPAA regulations. Contact us today.