One of the key advantages of billing outsourcing is the clear alignment of incentives between the practice and the billing company.

The billing company only gets paid when the practice gets paid while the practice’s staff gets paid irrespective of results. There is also an incentive for the billing company to perform better—the better it performs the more it collects for the practice and in turn the more it earns (and vice versa).  This is not true for in-house staff whose wages are fixed irrespective of performance and quality of work.

This issue, however, is often not fully understood or appreciated by many providers.  These providers frequently say: “the staff works directly for me in my office-- they are more loyal and will do a better job and I can see what they are doing”.  From our experience, this is simply not true.

I recently spoke with a partner at a busy cardiology practice.  While one of the billers was out sick, some paperwork was required and the supervisor went out looking for it.  When the supervisor opened the missing biller’s desk, a stack of unfiled, old claims was also discovered.  It turned out about $40,000 of them were past timely filling deadlines.  They were lost.  I repeat—the practice lost $40,000!  When the biller returned from her leave, she was “sternly” reprimanded.   Let me say it one more time—she was reprimanded.  No: not fired, but reprimanded.  Either way, the practice lost $40,000 in just this one instance alone.

When I asked the doctor why a more severe action was not taken, he explained to me that "we already have staffing problems and did not want to alienate the billing staff any further.”  The guilty biller was apparently moved to the front-desk role and is now responsible for gathering demographic information and money. 

I also asked how it was possible that the billing supervisor missed that $40,000.  Did they not reconcile charges and payments and track charges, payments and write-offs?  To this the doctor replied that “their system did not provide this level of reporting and no such reports were ever given to him”.  Since, the practice was using a new release of a major billing software, I know this system has such capabilities—it is just that either (1) no one knows how to use the system—that’s bad or (2) they just don’t want to bother—that’s’ worse!  Just imagine how much money is probably lost there annually.

At Cardiology Billing Partners we deal with these issues methodically and comprehensively:

• All the charges, payments and write-offs are visible to you.  We track everything so no charges (batches, days or places of service, etc) can be missed.
• If we have your charges and do not submit them properly--- Cardiology Billing Partners will reimburse your practice for what you would have been paid by the payers based on your allowable.  What this means is that you never suffer financially if we drop the ball.  Try to have your billers reimburse you if they drop the ball.
• Cardiology Billing Partners also provide clients with access to our system so that they can see real time status of their account. We will give you client portal access to reports and dashboard functionality 24/7.  At any time, you or your practice manager can go in and check status of claims, payments, patient balances, etc.  No more excuses that “the system cannot do this”!

We often hear from the physicians how hard and long they work for ever decreasing reimbursements.  All this is true.  However, too often we also see practices (through various reasons) hurt themselves financially—over and over again.

No—your staff will not work harder for you just because you employ them; and no- the biller who lost you $40,000 will not do any better job collecting money and gathering information from patients.  You will probably need to “sternly” reprimand them again.

A high performing cardiology medical billing company with complete transparency and full alignment of incentives is the surest path to medical billing excellence and strong financial performance for your cardiology practice. 

To learn more please visit Cardiology Billing Partners’ main website.