Why You Should Outsource Your Urgent Care Billing

For a medical biller even vaguely familiar with urgent care billing, it will come as no surprise that here’s a category of billing system that demands not just accuracy, but also speed. Given the essential nature of urgent care billing, one is likely to notice a few distinctions that set the urgent care billing system apart from billing for other types of healthcare systems. The most significant of these is the brevity of data that goes with the billing. Let me explain.

An Urgent Care Center typically works as a provider of medical services that perhaps do not require the immediate expedition of an Emergency Room but, at the same time, cannot afford to wait for the usual time required at a regular physician’s office. A speedy attention to the patient’s problem is what marks the operation of an Urgent Care Center. So it comes as no surprise that a typical urgent care billing system often excludes such pre-billing tasks as prior authorization or asking for elaborate patient details except for those which are absolutely necessary for filing a claim.

Another distinctive aspect of urgent care management is the volume of claims that an urgent care center typically processes in the course of a day. Given the quick-response nature of its service model, an urgent care usually witnesses a higher footfall than other kinds of healthcare providers. From the perspective of urgent care billing, it simply translates into more claims to be prepared and submitted per day than other kinds of medical centers.

Given all this, urgent care centers are often found struggling with their billing. The pressure is more and there are, on an average, more bills to be made every day. And if the billing staff is under-populated, or simply lacking in the knowledge of the latest codes or the various claim filing requirements as demanded by different payors, hell can break loose quickly in the billing area.

This is the main reason why a growing number of Urgent Care Centers across the US are outsourcing their billing to professional, third-party billing experts. The benefits are many and they go far beyond than merely bidding adieu to all the usual headaches associated with urgent care billing. One of the most important of them is ringing in a clear cost advantage in operations. In-house billing, let’s face it, is an expensive proposition. But when the entire billing operation is outsourced, especially to a billing service provider who can offer a distinctive cost advantage by virtue of basing its operations in a low-cost, offshore location, the overall cost of getting the billing done can come down substantially. It just makes better business sense, besides freeing the urgent care personnel to attend to more patients than spending long hours on preparing and submitting claims, handling denials, following up on delays and so on. So, if you are in the Urgent Care business and wish to improve your collection rate while bringing down your operational expenses, seriously consider outsourcing. It could take your overall profitability to a whole new level that you never thought possible.

Josh Knoll is a senior RCM analyst at Sunknowledge® Services Inc. which has been at the forefront for more than 16 years in providing 3600 support in medical billing and coding for 28+ specialties across US, with 100’s of excellent references from some of the very best names in DMEPOS, HME, Hospitals, Urgent Care Centers, Nursing Homes, Physician Practices, Orthotics & Prosthetics, Cardiology, Gastroenterology, Anesthesia and many more.