Should I Do Billing to Insurance Myself or Hire a Billing Service?

Billing plays a vital role to keep your business running. It determines your capacity as a business owner to make your cash flow intact avoiding the business to collapse. While you continue to create greater impact, your business will continue to prosper if you know how to manage your finances carefully.  From record keeping, cash in and cash out, invoice, giving statement and collection, billing takes place. It requires enough expertise to keep tracking all of these because inaccurate billing can cause serious problems. In the absence of accurate and reliable billing, major distractions to expected liquidity can ruin reinvestment plans, and in extreme cases put operations at risk.

Owning and billing for your own midwifery practice helps you and your practice in numerous ways. It gives you the opportunity to offer outstanding midwifery care, exactly how you envisioned your practice to be. It provides you the freedom and flexibility to manage your finances and cash flow.

However, like most of us desire to simply manage the in and out of our practices’ revenue and profitability, reality hits that this is beyond what we envisioned. In reality, it is not easy to crawl down tracking all the records, keeping all the collections, updating codes and description, managing finances, and all other aspects that are involved in billing and coding. Not to mention you being busy as the expert of your own practice, your business will cripple if you can’t manage these factors properly. Time will surely come that you will question yourself how you may be able to get out of that duty. To prevent that from happening, you should know how to assess your business’ needs. Are you capable of doing billing tasks on your own? Or is it time to ask for help from the experts? Here’s what you need to do to assess your practice further. 
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Assess Your Practice
To find out what the best choice is for your business, ask yourself these questions about your billing process, staff, physical space, and plans for the future:

1. Is your accounts receivable too high (more than 45 days)?
2. Are you experiencing an increased number of denied claims?
3. Is your net collection rate declining?
4. Are some of your charges and claims not making it to the appropriate payers?
5. Is coding and billing for your specialty especially complex?
6. Are you spending too much time on the business aspect of midwifery?
7. Do you want to focus more time on patient care?
8. Are you generally frustrated with the effectiveness of the billing/business office?
9. Are you concerned that your staff or office manager has knowledge of your income?
10. Do you feel too reliant upon your office manager?
11. Do you have several employees performing tasks that could be handled by one, more-experienced biller or manager?
12. Are you having a difficult time keeping or hiring experienced billing staff?
13. Does your staff lack a certified professional coder?
14. Do you struggle to find time to check patient insurance eligibility and benefits?
15. Are you planning to expand your practice?
16. Are you facing a major capital investment in new hardware or software?
17. Are your computer support fees too high?
18. Is your computer system obsolete?
19. Are hardware, software, and IT issues disrupting the operation of your practice?
20. Are you short on space and locked in to a long-term lease agreement?
21. Do you believe that your practice’s cost structure is too high?

Assessing your own practice by answering this set of questions will help you understand the needs of your practice. If you answered YES to most of the questions, then outsourcing will be good for you. Outsourcing by means of hiring medical billers and bringing in their expertise to your practice. However, if you answered NO to most of the questions stated, then keeping your billing operations within your practice is the best choice for you. There are a lot of great benefits if you choose to hire an expert biller like Midwives Advantage but choosing to keep your billing procedures in-house is not a bad idea either. You have to simply weigh the needs of your practice.
 
Reference
To hire or not to hire billing service. (n.d.). Retrieved August 5, 2022, from https://www.kareo.com/documents/to-hire-or-not-to-hire-billing-service.pdf