A CNN Money report earlier this year said that many independent doctors’ practices are starting to face serious financial issues. Shrinking Medicare reimbursements, changing regulations and drug costs are among the factors that are affecting them.
Some of the major issues faced by healthcare practices:
- Federal law cuts reimbursement rates every year to keep Medicare financially sound. Important cardiovascular services such as stress tests and echocardiograms faced Medicare reimbursements cuts of up to 35% to 40% recently. This has greatly affected the revenues of private cardiology practices which have a large number of patients age sixty and above. Other specialties also face similar situations.
- Some physicians have admitted that they are forced to refuse treatment for even needy patients because falling revenues prevent them from providing care at subsidized rates.
- It is just not financially feasible for them to have in-house staff to carry out medical billing and coding and other related tasks that have a major impact on revenue.
A private practice is like a small business, with the only difference that it is the insurer that is paying for the services. But not all doctors are good businessmen. This is why practices should think of outsourcing their medical billing management to a professional medical billing company. An experienced medical outsourcing company would be able to provide a full suite of medical billing services that cover patient scheduling and reminders, patient enrollment, insurance enrollment, insurance verification, coding and audits, account analysis, and AR and denial management.
Benefits that follow from outsourcing medical billing include:
- A team of medical billing specialists on the project
- Quicker turnaround times
- Fewer denials and higher reimbursement rates
- Timely reports
- Analysis of accounts by experts including AAPC certified coders
- Solutions on web-based with EMR software or client-specific software
- Regular QA checks
An established service provider can ensure healthcare practices all of these services at affordable rates, with cost savings of 30-40% compared to in-house medical billing.
