Is your ER your hospital’s most busy service? If so, you’re not alone. On top of the constant workload is the stress of working under life-or-death pressure by its very nature. It may be a good idea to take your medical billing and coding out of their hands to lighten both the stress and the load. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits.
Top Reasons To Outsource Your Hospital ER Billing
1. To Limit Errors
Outsourcing your medical billing is a great way to get your billing and coding into an environment where accuracy is the prime directive, not keeping patients alive. Let your doctors and nurses be experts on medicine and let coding experts handle the coding. This division of tasks and environment will result in fewer rejected claims or denials, both of which your bottom line and staff will appreciate.
2. Improve Focus
There are few things as dangerous to an emergency patient’s health as a distraction in the mind of the attending physician. Yet, it’s difficult to not think about the money when it’s so important to running a modern hospital. Maybe hospital administrators don’t have enough on their plates. Outsourcing your medical billing and coding is a great way to keep your doctors and hospital administration focused on what is important.
3. Reduce Expenses
Managing overhead is a major concern for any business. Adding an entire department for billing and coding is going to be a massive drain. Depending on the size of your operation it might not even require a full-time operation so the cost is even less necessary when you can outsource to a medical billing and coding specialist that can divide their overhead among many clients. This means a significantly lower cost to your ER.
4. Improved Patient Satisfaction
It could go without saying that when billing and compliance become someone else’s problem it makes space for more diligent attention toward customer satisfaction. The obvious outcome is a more satisfied customer base.
5. Improved Cash Flow
When you manage all of your medical billing and coding in-house there will always be a push and pull with filing. It’s hard to think of paperwork when lives are on the line after all. But, constant and quick turnaround with fewer denials makes sure reimbursements happen in a timely manner. Your cash flow won’t suffer because of paperwork. Outsourcing your medical billing and coding to a dedicated specialist keeps your cash flow running optimally.
6. Increased Revenue
We touched on this a little above in relation to expenses, but it’s worth mentioning on its own. The only reasonable way to manage coding and billing is with its own department and that requires added overhead and specialization. All of which swallow up revenue. If you decided not to create a separate department for medical billing and coding then the issue is even bigger because you slow down how quickly you can turn over patients. We want our doctors and nurses treating not working to become coding experts.
7. Ensure Adherence To Compliance
The health sector is an ever-changing, ever-improving matrix of public and private institutions that continually deal with changes in markets and regulation. These changes are reflected most in the billing and coding sector. Each change represents a new vector of potential error. Once again, outsourcing medical billing and coding helps to ensure you are always up to date with regulations and maintaining compliance.
