Training the Staff or Outsourcing Medical Billing: What Is More Cost-Effective?

Are you confused about training your staff, or are you considering outsourcing your medical billing and collection process? Efficient medical billing is a necessity to make a practice profitable. Efficient billing ensures steady cash inflow and proper revenue management. Recently, the frequent changes made in codes and standards by the insurance company cause denial in claims. Every denial of claims affects your practice negatively.

While some medical practices outsource their billing services, a few believe in training their staff for all their billing needs. Both training the staff or in-house billing and outsourcing medical bills have their pros and cons.

Is House Billing More Beneficial than Outsourcing:

In-house billing is not cost-effective in comparison to outsourcing. With an in-house billing practice, a healthcare professional can monitor the billing process and control it accordingly for better productivity. However, when you do in-house billing, you have to make sure that all of your staff members are well-trained and experienced enough to handle patients’ queries, process claims, doing IVs, and managing the RCM on their own. Surely, it is hardly possible for anyone to focus on both the treatment of the patients and handling their claims simultaneously. That is where the outsourcing is opted by most of the professionals who understands that by doing this, they will be able to give more time to their core practices, and will hand over the insurance related works to a trusted medical billing company to process. It does not only make the overall process easier for providers, but also contributes in patients’ satisfaction at the end.

Benefits of outsourcing of medical billing services:

Although outsourcing your medical bills may seem a bit expensive initially,However by outsourcing your medical bills, you can efficiently allocate your financial and human resources in other productive ways. Also, outsourcing medical bills help you in the numerous ways, which include:

• Reduces your work burden: 

By outsourcing your medical billing, you significantly reduce your work burden and time spent to train your employees. A less burdened office staff is able to provide an enhanced patient experience, thereby improving the patient’s engagement and satisfaction rates. An improved patient experience helps to strengthen your recall system. A sound recall system always indicates a flourishing medical practice and steady cash inflow.

• Higher and quick recovery:

Outsourcing ensures a substantial decrease in claim denial. With professionals taking care of the billing needs of your practice, all your claims are filed correctly and carry the complete required information so that your claims are never rejected by insurances. Lower claim denial means that you get paid sufficiently and on-time. When you get paid on-time with minimal rejection, you can use the revenue to boost your business.

• Maintenance of records becomes easy:

Arranging and compiling bills sometimes may become taxing. By outsourcing your billing services, it becomes easy for you to get the complicated bills segregated and well organized, thus, making audits easy while keeping the data safe. Proper maintenance of records ensures easy and reliable access to patient information for the doctors which is available anytime. By outsourcing your medical billing, you can be sure that all the insurance claims are appropriately filled with almost no errors.

• Reduced office management cost:

Outsourcing medical bills helps you manage the office efficiently and smoothly. Once you outsource medical billing services, you experience that the number of people you are accountable for has decreased. With a very few people to supervise, there is a lowered risk of things going wrong. By reducing the number of employees who directly report to you, you reduce your stress, thus enabling you to focus more on patient care.

• Gives you a clear picture of revenue generated:

By outsourcing medical billing services, you get a clear picture of the revenue generated, through regular and timely reports that are shared with you by the billing company. You are always fully aware of the overall health of your practice on important parameters which empowers you to make wiser financial decisions and improve your practice’s internal workflow.

Conclusion:

In-house or outsourcing medical billing & collection services have their own benefits and drawbacks. However, it is recommended that one should always opt for outsourcing his medical billing services to third parties, for both short and long term benefits. While in-house billing gives you the ease to control things, outsourcing billing needs is more revenue-generating. Both have their pros and cons.