Primary Thoughts on Outsourcing DME Billing

When to start considering outsourcing DME billing

One of the toughest challenges facing the healthcare industry in the US today is finding good and experienced personnel for billing & coding and various other administrative tasks. The pandemic has been a major disruptor in recent times. It has forced many out of their jobs or into early retirement. Now that the veil of uncertainty is lifting, things are returning to normalcy albeit at a very slow pace. The job market, for example, is still reeling from an acute shortage of skilled labor. Take the case of DME billing, for example. Skilled, competent billers have become a rarity. Even if one were to find experienced personnel to take care of DME billing needs, the cost to hire and retain them has increased substantially over the past few years.

In the face of such mounting problems, DME providers are actively looking out for less expensive but still effective means of getting their billing tasks completed. The most viable option available now is offshore outsourcing. A rapidly growing number of DME providers are engaging external billers, coders and other revenue cycle management experts on a contractual basis, most of who are working remotely from faraway offshore locations. In spite of such an extraneous arrangement, efficiency is seldom compromised. In fact, providers who have subscribed to dedicated, external billing assistance have noticed their collections improve, operational costs go down and denials rates reduced.

Other merits of outsourcing DME billing

One of the chief advantages of outsourcing is getting instant access to a vast pool of medical billers, coders and other professionals – all ready to start working as an extension of your operations arm. It definitely saves healthcare providers located in the US all the trouble of having to find skilled and competent medical billing personnel, recruit them, train them, provide them with the necessary infrastructural facilities and provide all allied employee benefits.

This is a big gain on the part of the providers. In an outsourced scenario, providers are required to pay only for the actual hours of work done at a pre-agreed flat hourly rate. The highly competitive rates that these personnel are usually available to work at, make outsourcing a remarkably sustainable mode of getting things done without unnecessarily hiking operational expenses. Simply put, with a skilled billing partner working for them, healthcare businesses can effectively bid goodbye to all the usual worries and hassles pertaining to their revenue cycle management. Done correctly, outsourcing of key business processes can be a remarkably effective way of improving overall efficiency and streamlining existing processes, all at a cost that is surprisingly affordable.