With the large number of medical insurance companies available it can be difficult for doctors offices to be able to serve people with as many different insurances as possible. Each insurance company has it's own various rules and regulations regarding what procedures are paid for, in what way and how much the maximum allowable billing amount is. Insurance companies also using a coding system which is supposed to make the billing procedure easier, however with different coding systems for different insurances it can become an incredibly complex procedure.
There are various option for a doctors office to meet the demands of dealing with insurance companies. They may hire more staff who specialize in billing insurance companies, unfortunately these costs will need to be recovered from somewhere and it is often met by necessarily increasing the cost of treatment to the patient. Another and equally undesirable option is to remove service for as many different types of insurance plan, this option means that care will not be available to as many patients as their insurance will no longer be serviced by that doctor. What can be the most convenient option is to hire an outside medical billing service, these companies specialize in completing the complex task of insurance company billing and negotiation without having to hire an in office specialist.
Depending on the medical billing service they will offer rates dependant on the amount of billing they pass on to an insurance company. The specialist medical billing service will have teams of experts on individual insurance plans and coders who understand the complex system that the plans have created to obfuscate the medical billing process. The convenience they offer for a doctors office can lead to less time spent concentrating on the billing process and negotiation with insurance plans and more time spent with patients seeing to their medical needs.
What a medical billing service offers to the individual patient is most importantly the lack of errors in submitting to insurance, with the teams who are specialist in insurance billing it is less likely that a mistake will be made with the billing process. This means that the cost of the procedure is far less likely to be passed back to you, meaning that you will not have to contact your insurance plan provider yourself to correct errors in billing issues. In many cases medical billing service will handle not only billing insurance companies but the billing of individual patients who lack insurance or who have procedures that are not covered by their plan. If a patient is offered a payment plan by the doctors office then it can be arranged and maintained by the outside billing service. If a patient does not remit payment for procedures that have been performed then the medical billing service can handle the process of starting collection on delinquent bills.
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What Does A Medical Billing Service Do For Your Doctor?
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