5 Tips for Choosing the Best Medical Billing Services

Not all Medical Billing Services (MBOs) work for a specific practice. For instance, if you’re an orthopedic clinic with 4 doctors servicing around 200 patients a week, you’ll need an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) that not only stores every patient’s medical record, but also performs tasks like sending notifications of claims deadlines and denials, and most importantly, it has the ability to restore encoded data lost in a power interruption or server glitch. A lot of software offer features suited to the convenience of the medical institution, group or individual, but you don’t always need a full-service medical billing company. Some tips you can use to find the best medical billing services company that suits your practice are:

Ask About the Company

How has their service benefitted their existing customers? What medical billing solutions do they offer? It helps to ask more than just the price, so you get a good glimpse of how well the company can handle all kinds of issues in medical billing.

Agree on Transparency

Before agreeing on rendering medical billing services, you have to make sure that you receive a copy of reported claims or denials at real-time, so you can also monitor the state of your organization’s financial health. Other data that you need to see would include posted payments, write-offs, open charges and charges on hold and adjustments.

Spot Accreditations

One way of knowing that a medical billing company is operating under state laws, is checking their track record and permissions. You can validate their credentials using this guide questions:

1. Are they a Certified Professional Biller?
2. Do they comply to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Healthcare Common procedure Coding System (HCPCS)?
3. Are they registered with the Better Business Bureau?

Learn About Their Pricing

It pays to know the functions of the service package you will get from the medical billing company. There are three payment models that medical billing companies offer to medical professionals or institutions which include:

1. Partly Fixed Model – In this model, the company charges a flat fee for carriers. This model is cost-effective on your part, but MBOs seldom use this model.
2. Percentage Model – This model is widely used by most companies; this model allows companies to charge a percentage of the total claims.
3. FIxed Fee Model – This model allows the company to charge a fixed price on each claim they submit. This is believed to be a less costly method of payment.

Train Your Staff on Proper Usage

Although you are outsourcing services to a medical billing company, it is the role of the agency to provide training to your staff whenever they need to access the system for verifying records or making their own reports to the management or as simple as entering new patients’ record and insurance policy number. With these tips in mind, you can lessen errors in medical billing and focus on taking care of your patients.

For informational purposes only.