Large medical billing firms

The days of medical billing where you walked into a doctor's office and the receptionist was busy printing out the few bills she had are long gone. Today, most of the medical billing that is done is done by very large companies. While this may seem more efficient and certainly more profitable to their customers, there are many pitfalls that a large company can fall victim to. In this article, you'll read some basic tips that large medical billing companies should follow in order to get the most out of their operation. Hopefully, by following these tips, you'll save yourself a lot of grief and heartache over the course of time.

The first and probably most important thing, is for the company to set itself up in such a way as to maximize productivity and at the same time minimize the risk of running into serious problems. One way to do this is to divide the billing responsibilities up among departments. If you're representing a large client base, you'll probably want to have one section of the staff handling billing for doctors in private practice. These will probably be your smallest accounts and as a result, you'll have to dedicate the fewest resources to this section. Another section should be assigned to handle the billing for large facilities. This is where the bulk of your billing will probably come from and you're going to want to have a large enough staff to handle it.

The next thing you're going to want to do is setup your software in such a way that it allows for growth without having to worry about your network getting bogged down. This is probably the most complicated part of the process of setting up an operation. It's often very hard to look into the future and see how much volume of billing you're going to do. But if you intend on going after the facility market, there is a very good chance that your operation is going to grow at a rapid rate. How do you prepare for this?

For starters, you're going to want to do the same thing with your software as you did with your departments. You're going to want to split up your databases into departments as well. You'll have one database for each item in your software for doctor billing and another database for facility billing. You will probably want to further break down facility billing into two sections of the alphabet. Possibly have one database for patients and facilities from A to M and another database for the letters N to Z. This will need to be done for all databases in the system.

As you have broken down the databases, you're probably also going to want to break down the staff as well, having half the staff take care of all patients from A to M and the other half taking care of patients from N to Z.

The above only scratches the surface as there is also the issue of forms, networking, software updates and a number of other issues. The point is, you're going to have a large operation and breaking it down into separate parts will make your company as a whole more manageable and ultimately more profitable.

Michael Russell