A New Urgent Care Should Use an Expert Urgent Care Biller
Mistake #11: Choosing an inexperienced spouse or a local physician receptionist to do billing for your new urgent care
Very rarely can a new urgent care center afford to hire an experienced biller to do billing for the new urgent care center. In the past, we often recommended hiring a good staffer and together learning the ins and outs of billing for your new urgent care center. Over the years, however, we have seen new urgent care centers struggle and lose substantial revenue; the new centers seemed more likely to be tangled in the ropes of medical billing than to have learned the ropes of medical billing.
Doing billing yourself in your new urgent care center is a difficult and risky business. By the time that you and/or your staffer realize that you cannot do urgent care billing effectively, you are likely to have lost more money than you can afford. Medical billing is extraordinarily complex and gets more complex with every passing year. What's more--urgent care is one of the most difficult specialties to bill. To start, someone in your new urgent care will need to know (or learn) all of the generic billing rules, such as where each payer wants the physician number, the practice number and which point-of-service code the payer will recognize. This by itself usually takes two to three months to sort out. Meanwhile you are not getting paid a penny for your services. Beyond the generic billing rules are the extraordinarily complex issues of billing for the multiple specialties covered in an urgent care practice. These specialties include primary care, orthopedics, occupational medicine, sports medicine, emergency medicine, neurology, and others.
What's more, the critical nature of billing and its effect on cash flow will distract you early on from what you should be focusing on--growing your new urgent care center. Early on in starting your urgent care center, you will need to focus on hiring staff, marketing your new center, convincing the local hospital that you are not the enemy, educating the public about the value of your center, developing relationships with executives in local corporations, and-most importantly-delivering excellent patient care. If you are a typical new urgent care entrepreneur, you may be too busy to learn the ins and outs of urgent care billing. Maybe finding a billing company with urgent care expertise makes sense.
Of course, we would encourage you to contact our sister company PV Billing: Urgent Care Billing Specialists to find out how a company that specializes in billing for urgent care centers might help ensure the success of billing in your startup urgent care center. You might, also, consider trying some of the resources listed below:
Note: Practice Velocity is not affiliated with any of these external websites and makes no warranty, makes no guarantee, nor accepts any liability as to the quality or benefits of these links. By clicking on any of the following links the user expressly accepts all liability and releases Practice Velocity from any liability that might arise from the use of or from the information contained on the following links.
Modified EMR for Urgent Care - Practice Velocity Urgent Care Solutions offers the one integrated medical records and practice management solution designed specifically for use in the urgent care center and occupational medicine clinic. Visit our homepage to see what Practice Velocity Urgent Care Solutions can do for your developing or new urgent care center. Practice Velocity solutions are used in over 180 urgent care centers (including many new startup urgent care centers).
EMS Billing Services - EMS billing procedures, electronic ambulance insurance claims billing, air medical resource management training, EMS emergency medical codes and billing procedures - Texas / Louisiana and nationwide.
Medical Coding.Net - Carries medical coding supplies, retailer carrying claim forms, medical coding books, desktop software, data files, and new Internet software, (SpeedECoder®, http://www.speedecoder.com). Offers free shipping.
Diversity Medical Billing Services - A leading provider of medical billing services and insurance claim lifecycle management. We focus on helping your bottom line, so you can focus on helping your patients.
www.surgicalbilllers.com - Certified coders and insurance claims specialists offering billing services to solo and small group practices around the country.
