Believing that you have the right billing partner and ignoring signs that indicate otherwise is what many healthcare providers and practices do. With billing partners becoming a dime, practices and hospitals often pick a wrong partner and lose money. Below we take a look at how those who are already tied to a medical billing partner often find out that they bet on the wrong horse, and that it is costing them.
Picking a billing partner to process your claims means that you get a dedicated provider who is available to process them daily. With claims processed within practices often having an error rate of about 30%, a good billing partner can help reduce it to about less than 1%. A wrong partner however cannot consistently provide a low error rate and causes practices to lose money or spend extra time fixing mistakes.
Partners who promise to deliver details about employee’s credentials and the tasks performed by them but finally do not, ultimately turn out to be poor performers overall. Such partners also often do not provide any knowledge and expertise as value additions and just cannot meet the needs of healthcare providers over several years.
Billing partners should be able to guarantee that customer data including names, social security numbers, procedures and any diagnoses are secure even if they are transmitted across the globe. Those who do not have standard procedures in place, regularly lose patient data and cannot provide you access to them when needed should not be trusted over the long term.
Many billing partners fail to provide healthcare providers with the dedicated account managers who are responsible for handling the communication between both the concerned parties. This is not standard practice, and ideally there should be a contact person and a backup if the primary contact person is on leave to handle the needs of the clients during their working hours.
Employing billing software that is not standard or well-known can lead to several problems and ultimately it will not meet the needs of your practice. Additionally antiquated software can result in practices not being able to meet regulatory requirements and could also result in the medical billing process failing to integrate with EHR and other systems.
Websites of some billing partners are rarely updated with positive reviews or referrals from clients and these companies often promise to provide them later. In many such cases the names of these clients never surface and healthcare providers are left with a partner who has very little experience in their specialty.
Searching and opting for an outsourcing partner is a long and tedious process and even after it many healthcare providers and practices end up making the wrong choice. Ignoring the signs that mark a wrong billing partner is even more dangerous to your practice and immediate action needs to be taken to switch to a better one.