Aiming for Improved Efficiency in Urgent Care Billing

Understanding Efficiency in Urgent Care Billing

One ought to start by trying to understand what defines efficiency in Urgent Care billing. Even though opinions will vary, it can be broadly described as being accurate, cost-effective and productive. Urgent Care facilities may argue that their billing operations are in good shape, but a closer and more critical inspection may surprise them. A good measure to gauge the efficiency of any Urgent Care billing process is the amount of collections that a practice manages to achieve in a month. Other metrics like the denial rate, or the ratio of claimed compensation against actual collections can also provide valuable insights.

Broadly speaking, a billing process can be deemed successful if it leads to maximum possible collection in the shortest possible time. This is not very difficult to achieve if an Urgent Care facility is armed with a competent and skilled billing desk. However, good billers are hard to come by, especially amidst the dearth of skilled labor in the market today. There has also been a rise in minimum wages in many parts of the country, and this has made maintaining back-office personnel more expensive than ever for most healthcare practices.

In search of Efficiency with Economy

In the face of the current scenario, a growing number of Urgent Care facilities are opting to outsource their billing operations to external billing agencies. In most cases, such agencies operate on a remote assistance model and are able to provide services at a rate that is remarkably lower than the local U.S. market.

One of the biggest advantages of engaging such medical billing companies is that it lets Urgent Care businesses have instant access to a vast pool of trained and skilled medical billing personnel who are ready to start working for them on a dedicated basis. It saves all the usual trouble of having to scour the local job market for finding competent billers and coders, along with the hassle of having to train them, arrange for office space, and provide employee benefits and so on.

Professional and dedicated intervention results in a highly productive and extremely efficient billing process. In most cases, these third-party agencies can effectively help to reduce operational cost, sometimes up to 80% or more! This is a tremendous gain that no Urgent Care practice can truly afford to overlook.