Originally Posted by
PartTimer
The short of it is that I guess it depends on how you go about it. If you are paying a biller to do exactly this, it is not a win vs what you are paying them, at all. Of course, if you have multiple locations, a biller becomes more viable.
We use existing staff; it takes them no more than a few hours' downtime every couple of weeks to burn through sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth of payments. Our software makes it easy to produce a "line billing," and anticipates payment amounts because it contains the backend programming for it. Most of the EHR and billing systems I have used make this pretty intuitive. I have never worked in an office that did not do line billing. It adds a minute or two per patient to do this once they are used to it, and you will not have patients asking for line billing, it makes materials and procedures billed through insurance much easier to explain when patients have questions, makes you look less sloppy, etc. This is time many employees would just use to wander mentally between patients, anyway.
It is useful for more than just reconciling payments, as well. We can self identify when people are billing things incorrectly, since someone is double checking every invoice upon reconcile, and it is much easier to catch fishy employee behavior when you have a few people looking at these types of things constantly. Of course, you have to train staff do do this themselves, but it doesn't take much time, and it makes them more useful to you. Managers and supervisors should be familiar with the process, anyway.
This goes right along with daily reconciliation of credit and cash transactions, and reconciling bank deposits. It's good accounting, and if you spread the work out, you spread risk through shared responsibility and culpability, and have little, if any, impact on payroll. So, no: paying a biller won't net you more money because these plans incorporate all the plan details into the online submission process, anyway, and it's all done by computer. It's the other details that make it worth your staff's time. Which is, of course, just my opinion.
Whether you stick with it or not, good luck, and stay busy!
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