Cost of Outsourcing Medical Billing: How Your Practice Saves Money

If you run a medical practice of some kind, then outsourcing your medical billing and collections services might be something that you will want to look into. There are many benefits to outsourcing your medical billing and collections services, one of the most convincing being the ability to make more money.

The following are three steps that you should take in order to determine how much money you can actually end up making or saving by outsourcing your medical billing and collections services:

The cost of your staff

Outsourcing your entire medical billing and collections services won’t seem nearly as expensive once you add up the costs of hiring a staff that can do it for you. According to PayScale, the median medical biller makes around $15.23 an hour. They can also make upwards to $3,000 in bonuses and $5,000 in profit shares.

All together, adding a single medical biller to your staff can cost roughly between $24,312 and $43,341 a year. And this is just for the salary of one medical billing staff member. You will also be responsible for their healthcare costs, federal and state taxes for hiring each medical biller and training to ensure that your medical billing staff remain up-to- date on all the latest industry developments.

Depending on how large your practice is – or how big it grows – you may need more than just one or two medical billers on staff if you want to keep your medical billing and collection services in-house. Add these costs up and compare them to the rate of outsourcing to a medical billing service to see get an idea of how much you can save on staff alone.

The cost of your equipment

If you maintain in-house medical billing and collection services, you will need to invest money into medical billing equipment as well. You’ll have to pay for hardware costs as well as software costs. Medical billing software can be very expensive, and you’ll need to regularly upgrade it to stay up-to- date. If you outsource, you won’t have to worry about any of these costs.

The cost of claim submission errors

If you are understaffed, then it’s much more likely that there will be some claim submission errors. These errors can result in not receiving the amount that you could have due to the use of improper codes or a full-out rejection of your claim. A claim rejection must then be appealed, which can be a challenging and time-consuming process in itself.

If your medical billers are busy trying to create an effective appeal, they may end up making even more errors on your claim submissions because they are overworked. It’s also worth noting that outsourcing will ensure that claim submissions are done in a timely manner. If you do medical billing in-house, a medical biller who is overworked may not be able to submit claims in a timely manner, something that could happen if they miss work for some reason as well.

Look at the amount of claims that were denied and the number of appeals that were rejected over the course of a year. Odds are, you would have been able to save this amount had you outsourced. A professional medical billing and collections company is much less likely to make claim submission errors and have a higher chance of winning rejection appeals.

As you can see, outsourcing your medical billing and collections services can help to cut costs as well as increase the profits of your practice.

ProMD Medical Billing is happy to help with your billing assessment needs so you can maximize profits and increase patient satisfaction. To learn more about how ProMD can make your practice run like a well-oiled machine, call 866-960-9558 or fill out our online form to request a billing assessment.

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