What are Medical Billing Services?

Medical billing services are businesses that provide coding, invoicing, and collection services to different types of health care facilities. A billing service of this type may work with doctor’s offices, clinics, or hospitals to handle the process of filing claims with insurance companies as well as sending statements of account and invoices to patients. There are several advantages to outsourcing these functions, rather than conducting them using full-time staff.

One of the main advantages associated with using medical billing services is the savings. Rather than having full-time staff that handle such issues as preparing transcriptions of medical records, filing claims with various health insurance providers, and invoicing patients, these functions can be outsourced to a service for a fraction of the cost. This allows the client to reduce expenses associated with salaries, taxes, benefits, and even training costs. Depending on how the client normally does business, there can also be a significant savings on printing and office supply costs as well.

Another reason that medical billing services are so popular is that the client does not have to invest time and money in training personnel to handle necessary billing functions, such as coding claims, keeping track of the status of various claims, and handling the collection process on delinquent accounts. Because the billing service handles all these details, the service oversees the training process, making sure their employees are always fully competent to handle anything that has to do with the billing and collection process.

Many medical billing services offer more than one package or suite of services to their clients. One basic package may be ideal for a doctor’s office or a small practice, while a different package may include additional support services that would be more attractive to a larger entity, such as a hospital or clinic. For example, a larger package may include medical transcription services or special functions associated with emergency medical services and their costs, where a basic package would focus mainly on filing medical claims and maintaining patient records.

Medical billing services structure their programs in several different ways. One popular model is to provide personnel who work on-site to code and process claims, handle transcriptions of medical records, and log payments to patient accounts. Other services work by assigning a team to each client; data is forwarded to the team, who then handles everything from processing claims to invoicing patients. Regular reports are issued electronically to the client, so there is never any question of the status of various patient accounts.