Urgent care clinics play a vital role as they try to fill the gap between the primary care provider and the emergency room. That’s probably why they’re increasing in popularity and are expected to be worth $26 billion by 2023.
To command your fair share in this market, you must have great command over the medical billing process and have to optimize your workflows for maximum returns. Most urgent care owners handle medical billing and coding functions on their own.
They feel to have better control of their clinic revenue by handling it all by themselves. It’s also true that many urgent care businesses have completely lost control of their revenue because they insist on billing in-house for their urgent care center.
By outsourcing urgent care billing services, you can focus more on patient care, stay less worried about documentation and compliances while collecting more for delivered services.
Limitations for In-House Billing
Managing an in-house billing team offers challenges like employee turnover, training costs, employment benefits costs, and a lack of urgent care billing experts. Managing in house medical billing could be risky for the following reasons:
- Lack of urgent care billing experts: Very few experts in urgent care billing even exist. Can you really find and hire an employee with true expertise in every area of urgent care billing? Owners of established, multi-site urgent care centers often complain that even they can’t find these experts.
- Employee turnover: Another problem with hiring your own biller is that it fails the single-point-of-failure test. Of course, no one wishes for an employee to fail or leave, but many urgent care centers end up losing their biller due to common reasons like illness, injury, termination, or resignation. The center often gets months behind in revenue cycle management.
- Cost: If you managed to get a biller with urgent care billing experience, but watch out; that person will likely demand a salary outside of a reasonable range for the budget of a typical single urgent care center. In addition, the cost of being wrong about the biller’s expertise and execution may result in lost revenue.
Outsourcing Urgent Care Billing
You might want to consider some of the following reasons for outsourcing your urgent care billing.
- Expertise: Rarely can an urgent care center find a single urgent care billing specialist with good experience and expertise in urgent care billing.
- Simplicity: Outsourcing allows urgent care executives to focus on marketing, quality, training, performance, and all of the important elements of operating a quality urgent care center.
- Stability: When a biller at a large urgent care billing company leaves, someone else steps in and keeps your accounts receivable up to date. When your own single-employee biller resigns, you may get several months behind in collections. This can result in financial difficulties or even financial failure of the center.
- Payer contracting: A generalist biller might have some general experience in contracting with payers. Even many medical billing companies won’t have access to anyone with urgent care contracting experience. Even more unlikely will be that they have recent urgent care contracting experience and that is the only experience that is relevant because most payers are completely changing their contracting methods and terms for urgent care.
Benefits of Outsourcing Urgent Care Billing
- Convenience is one of the main reasons that urgent care owners choose to outsource. A billing provider handles all the data entries, fixes rejected claims, and sends invoices to the patient.
- An outsourced company can help you with year-round billing needs, without having to account for unexpected employee turnover. This also allows your staff more time to engage in more patient care activities.
- Billing agencies are generally better at collecting patient responsibility and insurance follow-up compared to in-house staff.
- Outsourcing saves money on hardware and software costs in your office.
- It allows your staff to focus on patient-care activities, including delivering compassionate, evidence-based care that gets more patients in through your doors.
- Outsourcing will help ensure that your practice remains in compliance with regulatory agencies, like the Office of the Inspector, government payer (Medicare and Medicaid), and private payers. The costs of non-compliance, even if accidental, can have an effect on your revenue cycle management.
Do you really have more control of your billing if you do it in-house? Yes, that’s good, but control without adequate knowledge, tools, and skills is surely not a good thing. You can outsource your urgent care billing services to Medical Billers and Coders (MBC) which is known for having leading urgent care billing and coding experts.
Whether it’s urgent care coding, claim submission, denial resolution, accounts receivable management, or provider credentialing, we provide all urgent care services with ease. To know more about our urgent care billing services, please contact us at info@medicalbillersandcoders.com / 888-357-3226
FAQs
1. Why should urgent care centers outsource billing services?
Outsourcing helps manage high patient volume, reduces administrative burden, and improves overall billing efficiency.
2. How does outsourcing improve revenue for urgent care centers?
It reduces coding errors, speeds up claim submissions, and increases reimbursement rates through expert billing processes.
3. Can outsourcing reduce claim denials?
Yes. Professional billing teams ensure accurate coding, proper documentation, and compliance with payer rules, which lowers denial rates.
4. How does outsourcing help with compliance?
Billing companies stay updated with changing healthcare regulations and coding guidelines, helping practices avoid compliance risks.
5. Does outsourcing improve workflow in urgent care?
Yes. It streamlines billing operations, reduces staff workload, and allows providers to focus more on patient care.