How to Counter Personnel Shortage in Urgent Care Billing?

Challenges facing Urgent Care billing in current times

The challenges faced by Urgent Care billing during present times are not very different from those that seem to plague other kinds of healthcare billing. Rising inflation, along with an alarming dearth of trained and skilled personnel in the market, is making medical billing more difficult than ever. Urgent Care billing is no exception. It is an area of medical billing that is characterized by a unique set of requirements. Of these, speed and accuracy are among the foremost. In all frankness, these are the kind of requirements that can only be met through skilled and professional intervention. But with thousands of billers having gone into hibernation or early retirement during the dark days of the pandemic, Urgent Care businesses are facing extreme difficulties, hitherto seldom encountered, in bringing back the people that they had asked to leave (or had left on their own account) during the heyday of the Covid-19 menace.

To reiterate, Urgent Care billing is an area that is marked by speed and accuracy. The former is due to the ambulatory nature of the patients that practically walk into such facilities and demand to be treated then and there, leaving the billing desk with little time to prepare itself for their arrival. This requires the billing desk personnel to be quick in capturing all the necessary patient data – thoroughly and accurately – that would eventually go into formulating a claim afterwards with the aim of getting reimbursed by the insurance payer. Any missing information can be extremely difficult to collect after the patient has walked out of the facility, and such gaps invariably lead to missed revenue.

In search of a few good men

So what does an Urgent Care practice require at the end of the day? Simple, it’s a handful of competent, skilled and dependable people who can take care of all their billing requirements with utmost efficiency, accuracy and speed. And how does one find them quickly and economically, without having to lose sleep over the process? The answer lies in strategic outsourcing. Let’s take a closer look.

To effectively bypass the steep labor costs of the domestic market and take advantage of the remarkably lower rates offered by other countries for similar services, a large number of Urgent Care businesses across the U.S are choosing to outsource their billing operations to specialized, third-party services providers, many of whom are located in remote offshore locations. Of course, such deputation of billing services to an external agency requires it to comply with quite a few mandatory requirements and standards. The delivery of such services is also heavily dependent on international telecom services and high speed internet connectivity. There is little other difference that exists in the offshore billing mode.