Guide to Medical Billing

The first step to starting a medical billing business is choosing your claims management software platform. Determining your software costs is a necessary first step before you can determine what rates to charge for your services. Additionally, you may be required to hire more or less employees to handle things like charge entry, claims management, document management, accounts receivable management, and secondary claims filing- all of which can be automated to varying degrees depending on the robustness of the software you choose. One of the first decisions you need to make is whether to get traditional, or web-based software. Traditional software has a one-time price, but may require you to purchase hardware, buy a set number of support hours, pay per-claim electronic submission fees, and require the purchase of a new license in the case of future software upgrades and version releases. Web-based software is priced month-to-month (software-as-a-service) and doesn’t require hardware purchases because it can be accessed from any machine with internet access. Software-as-a-service is generally priced all-inclusive of training and support, software upgrades, and claims submission fees. Scalability is the other main advantage to choosing a web-based medical billing software, as its price is usually based on the number of providers creating claims within the software. In this way the price of the software changes in direct proportion to the amount of revenue you are bringing in, as opposed to being tied to arbitrary factors like the number of machines from which you want to access the software. Click Here to learn more about PracticeAdmin’s practice management and billing software prices.

The second step to starting a medical billing business is marketing for customers. Before beginning your marketing, you need to first determine what kind of business you want to start, and what market you want to serve. What will your market be? Will you focus on a certain medical specialty? Do you want to work with medical practices of a certain size or geographic location? Once you’ve defined your market its time to start getting the word out about your services. Word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing strategies in any business, and especially in medicine, so use whatever personal connections you have available to you. You might wish to join professional medical societies which will allow you to network with medical providers in your area. Marketing professionals caution that it takes upwards of 3 separate contacts before you get our message across, so just stick with your marketing and be persistent and you should eventually begin to see results.

The third step is working with your customer to increase their collections, and reduce their headaches. The work of a medical biller is a never-ending quest for efficiency. Your customers are demanding, and will want to see continuously improving results. A strong medical billing and practice management system will lay the groundwork, but after that it will be up to your hard work and communication to keep them happy. As you first begin working for a new client who wasn’t doing a good job with their billing, you should be able to increase their collections rather easily. As time goes on collections may peak, or you may have down months, at those times your ability to communicate clearly with your clients will make all the difference. The more transparent you run your business, and greater amount of data reporting you do for your clients, the happier they will be. For this reason, it is critical that you choose a practice management system with strong data reporting capabilities. Click Here for more information on PA’s built-in practice management financial reports.

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