
Reduce Overhead
When considering your profitability for the year, it’s a common goal of all business owners to reduce their expenses. Outsourcing is one of the best ways to lower the operational cost of your business. Among other things, the most significant are the two S’s: Salaries & Software.
Depending on what type of business you operate, you may have an on-staff billing manager. While salaries for these positions can vary, the accumulated cost of wages, benefits and payroll processing for employees can add up. Average salary for a billing specialist can be between $25,000-$45,000 per year, according to payscale.com. Outsourcing your billing virtually slashes that in half.
Another luxury of outsourcing to a reputable company is access to top-of-the-line software. Having a central HIPAA-compliant electronic system where all things billing are housed can lift a weight off your shoulders and keep your practice in compliance. While the billing company you choose should manage the billing cycle, you should also be given access to see all of your data at any time, which is quite helpful when you have a copay question, insurance questions, etc.
More Robust Reports
With more sophisticated software comes better reports and practice management analytics. The ease of generating one single report for your accountant at the end of the year is proof enough. When your goal is to grow your practice or even understand more about your patient demographic, reports are everything when making strategic business decisions. Many of our clients come to us for reporting when they are deciding on whether or not to participate in specific networks; being able to look at tangible numbers and make educated calculations about your future income allows you to make smart decisions for your practice.
Eliminate Claims Rejections & Get Paid Faster
When outsourcing, you know that your account is being managed by experts who do this very task all day every day. With quality assurance built into most of today’s billing software along with a dedicated account manager, the likelihood of sending out an incomplete or incorrect claim is significantly reduced. With less denials for errors, you can also expect to see your payments faster and at a more consistent rate. Particular to those in private practice, consistent income can make or break your ability to stay afloat.
Leverage Expertise
Again, reputable billing companies with years of experience employee only the best in the industry. Currently, we are dealing with tough mergers (Tricare/Humana), the potential for Value Based Care, the introduction of telehealth, and much more. It is the job of these companies and their employees to understand and make educated suggestions about these changes for your practice; you shouldn’t have to spend hours doing this yourself. Practice management advice and consulting should go hand-in-hand with an established billing company. For even simpler tasks, companies and their employee experts have spent the hours learning the ins and outs of insurance companies and creating contact relationships to assist them in their everyday work, proven invaluable to providers who feel like outsiders.
Focus on Patient Care
When it’s all said and done and before anything else, patient care is the most essential concern at hand. Removing all other obstacles to allow this to happen always results in the best experience for the patient and the provider. Not only that, the best way to grow a mental health business is by personal recommendations from your patients to friends and family who are also looking for a provider. The quality of care you can provide relies heavily on the amount of time you have in a day. If you are booked with seven back-to-back patients, but still need to do four hours of billing and admin work, either you aren’t making it home for dinner or you are rushing to get paperwork done in between sessions, flustered and unfocused.
Outsourcing your billing can bring many luxuries and eliminate the current headaches and stressors you have while saving you time and money. Our clients enjoy these benefits working with our team of experts and are able to see their profession in a new light again.