Cheap Medical Billing Service | Compare Options and Costs in 2023
Medical billing services chiefly charge on a percentage basis of billed accounts ranging nationally from 2% – 15%. For every dollar that you bill, they claim a small percentage of that amount. Finding the most affordable medical billing service is primarily about finding the company that charges the lowest possible percentage on your billed services. Normally, these fees run around 8% of total billing. However, there are other fees that can also affect the overall pricing that you pay for medical billing. For example:
- Setup Fees: Range from $0 – $275
- Contracts: From 0 -12 months
- Billing Fees: From flat-rate fees to percentage-based
If you’re looking for the most economical option, you should also pay attention to any setup or initialization fees that your prospective medical billing services may offer. These may range up to several hundred dollars, but there are low-priced alternatives out there that don’t charge any setup fees at all.
Compatibility with other pieces of software often used in health care settings, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) management software, can cause a medical billing service to charge higher rates. However, the gains that you make with such integration are often more than worth any additional costs.
Additional software that makes the medical billing service part of a larger suite can also cause costs to go up, but may provide added value to your business. This could include things like an integrated EHR system or appointment scheduling software. Although these suites might not be the most economical on the market, they offer the advantage of being a turn-key solution that you can set up and immediately start using to automate a wide ranging number of areas within your practice.
What is a Medical Billing Outsourcing Service?
A medical billing service is a third-party provider that will take all of your billing information and then proceed to complete all of the work required to see your firm paid for its services. It is very important that these billing companies are HIPAA compliant to avoid and disasters. These services are typically provided to you in the form of a bundled software service that you or your staff will use to load all of your billing requests into. From there, the service takes care of processing and collecting the payments.
The difference between outsourcing medical billing and handling it in-house is tremendous. The entire industry is moving towards automation, and the speed at which these software services can process claims and deal with insurance providers is unmatched by anything that can be managed through in-house workers.
There are also a number of checks and balances in place in medical billing software to ensure that your practice isn’t losing out on important income. Coding mistakes, improper billing procedures, and a lack of follow-up are all accounted for through automation and reminders, helping to ensure that you are able to always collect what you are owed.
Medical billing services often include other bundled services as well, enabling you to handle all aspects of your practice through a single suite of software. This is particularly convenient if you’re just making the move to automating your practice, as you will find many providers that offer “one-stop shopping” as it were.
What to Look for in Low-Cost Medical Billing Services?
Although you certainly want to find a cheap medical billing service that will keep as much of your profits in your pockets as possible, there are certain things that are absolutely essential when dealing with medical billing services. These include:
Full HIPAA compliance and training for support staff. Failure to be compliant with all applicable legislature is a sure sign that a medical billing service is not worth the headaches and liabilities that would emerge from dealing with it- Excellent support. Although you will hear many promises about automation, nothing can be 100% automated and work 100% of the time. Only do business with medical billing services that can offer excellent, hands-on customer support in addition to being low-priced.
- EHR integration. The medical billing service that you choose must either integrate with your existing EHR software or have its own EHR system that you plan on switching to. Without this, you will find that the headaches created by the service may outweigh the benefits of using it.
- Claims Scrubbing to help prevent errors.
- Patient Statements mailings.
- Collection Agency Transfer for unpaid bills.
- Reporting service to generate data summarizing your practice’s financial performance.
Full HIPAA compliance and training for support staff. Failure to be compliant with all applicable legislature is a sure sign that a medical billing service is not worth the headaches and liabilities that would emerge from dealing with itFinally, you will have a key decision to make when you are selecting your affordable medical billing service. You will need to decide whether you want a locally hosted or cloud-based system.
Local: The advantages of local systems are chiefly centered around data security. You are in charge of your data management, but this comes with the added time and resource costs of maintaining servers and monitoring data backups.
Hosted: In hosted services, everything is hosted on the cloud, and you access your information through web-based software. The advantages here include reduced cost, increased uptime, decreased in-house IT resources required, and the ability to access your medical billing service from any device, desktop or mobile, no matter where you are in the world.
Bargain Outsourced Medical Billing Services with Discounted Prices?
When trying to find the most inexpensive medical billing service, the key is to look for the company that charges the lowest percentage of your billings. Here are two options from the low end of the spectrum:
MedEye Services: MedEye services offers a speedy, inexpensive medical billing solution. They submit all claims within 24 hours of entry into the system, and billing can be as low as 3% of your collected costs. They are a reliable company with a significant amount of experience in the industry, and a team of highly trained coders who work hard to ensure that all billable claims are coded correctly.
AdvancedMD Inc: While slightly more expensive, with collections usually landing at between 6%-8%, Advanced MD is still on the cheap end of the spectrum of medical billing services. This service is ideal for those who are new to outsourcing their billing, as there are hands on managers that will help you learn how to best put your new service to work in your practice.
Spend a Little to Earn a Lot
Handling billing internally is time consuming, costly, and frustrating. Ultimately, using an outsourced medical billing service to collect payment results in an increase in overall income for almost every practice that makes the switch. While you will be giving up a small portion of each of your collected bills, the total percentage of successful collections will rise enough to more than compensate for that cost.