When working in private practice your attention is always going to be pulled in two directions: your clinical work or running a business.
The most important part of working in medicine is the treatment and care of your patients, so of course that should be your focus – it’s why you went into the career after all. But in doing so, it can be easy to overlook the importance of the more business elements of private practice.
In many clinics, billing is the responsibility of secretaries or admin staff. However, billing can present significant challenges and should be treated as a speciality in itself. Doing it incorrectly can have a significant impact on your cash flow and overall income as a business.
In a nutshell, working with a billing provider or partner can help you in a number of ways including:
- Making sure you get paid quickly and efficiently
- Reducing your outstanding debt levels
- Increasing your cash flow and income opportunities
- Maintaining good patient experiences and relationships
- And most importantly, letting you focus on what you do best
From our own experiences of working with clients, we’ve helped them achieve some impressive results, such as reducing their aged debt by 78% in just six months. We’re proud to have the lowest debt level rate of all UK medical billing providers at just 0.28%.
How can a medical billing partner help you boost your income?
While it may seem counterintuitive that paying for an outsourced service means you are earning more money, it can actually help you increase your turnover.
In addition to the usual expected results of managing your billing and collection processes, a true billing partner can add even more value to your practice income.
Fee Benchmarking
Using our detailed industry and coding knowledge, you can be provided with access to market benchmarks to help you optimise your earnings.
At Bill Medical we offer a wide range of fee benchmarking advice - at no extra charge - so you can be confident that your fees are never out of step with the market norms. That way you can make sure what you’re charging isn’t too high that insurers or patients will question them, or (more importantly) they aren’t so low that you’re restricting your earning potential.
Better relationships with insurers
Billing partners will have fantastic relationships with the major private healthcare insurers. Not only do these relationships speed up how quickly your invoices get paid, but we can also negotiate and re-negotiate your contract and fees to ensure optimum income and referrals.
In some cases, we have been able to increase insurer referral rates by up to 42%!
Not only does this benefit your billing processes with insurers, but you can also reap huge rewards through your indemnity insurance too. We work with a leading insurance broker who can offer Bill Medical clients largely reduced premiums thanks to the highly detailed billing data we hold. So far our clients have made savings of between 18% - 32%, with average reductions of over £4k each this year.
In-depth industry knowledge and data
In addition to regular billing and collection, we hold huge amounts of historic industry data. This data is a rich source of information which can be interrogated to provide you with comprehensive insights into current trends of activity within private practice - for example, where patients have come from, most popular types of treatment provided etc.
Making good use of this knowledge can help you to develop your practice’s future business plans.
Medical billing providers can increase efficiencies and improve patient experiences
Increasing your income opportunities is not the only added benefit of partnering with an external billing provider like Bill Medical. Here’s a few more reasons why you’ll receive further value:
- More links to the admin chain: We have contacts and strategic relationships with other administration providers that will benefit your practice financially and help it to run as efficiently as possible. From secretarial support and accounting to legal and insurance providers, we can help you identify where you need help and get you access to preferential rates.
- Lighten the load: An external provider can lift the burden of tricky and time-consuming administration tasks so that you and your team can focus on your patients’ treatment and continue to produce great outcomes.
- Journey to success: Billing and collection is the final hurdle of the patient journey where their fantastic experience with your practice can come crashing down. We can be a direct point of contact for your patients to discuss their challenges with payment so that we can reinforce their positive experience and you remain their clinical contact only.
Don’t just take our word for it
We’re proud to provide a highly personable, effortless billing and collection service to help manage the financial side of your practice. But not only that, we love helping you make the most of your practice as a business and enhance your revenue wherever possible.
‘Since we started using Bill Medical the figures speak for themselves, with a huge reduction in debt and excellent ongoing billing and collection. This was what we wanted, but the further and unexpected benefits have been equally valuable. This has included transforming our relationships with insurers for all individuals and benchmarking our fees to ensure they are at market rates. Bill Medical have also helped us negotiate with other suppliers to achieve savings across all our admin services. Finally, the personal touch with individual dedicated contacts in the team has given us great reassurance. We would unreservedly recommend them to colleagues (and we frequently do).’ Castle Orthopaedics
By making the most of the industry contacts and free additional services provided by a medical billing partner, you will be setting your practice up for future success.
If you’re looking to create an efficient and effortless billing process and make sure your patients are receiving an excellent service, feel free to get in touch to find out how we can help you do just do that.