How to Cope With Increased Pressure in Urgent Care Billing

Understanding The Nature of Urgent Care Billing

Urgent Care billing, or in other words, billing for services rendered at an Urgent Care facility, differs from other kinds of healthcare billing in a particular respect. It is the unpredictable nature of the volume of patients that an Urgent Care center can treat in a single day. This fact has rarely been more evident than in the last two years when hundreds of thousands of people had flocked to Urgent Care facilities to get tested for COVID-19 infection, or to get vaccinated against it. So it is very difficult to predict the number of patients that would, even on a broad scale, visit an Urgent Care center on a given day. It can range from just a handful to hundreds.

Problems with Increased Pressure on Urgent Care Billing

Increased footfall means an increased burden on the billing process. With every patient that walks into an Urgent Care facility, there is a string of activities that need to be completed with speed and precision. These include capturing all the requisite patient information, drawing up the bill, adding the right codes and submitting the claim to the pertinent insurance plan provider. With increased visitors, the pressure naturally mounts and the regular billing staff may have to struggle with getting more claims completed in the same time than before. Under such circumstances, it is not unnatural to see more errors creeping into the billing and critical information getting missed. This, in turn, leads to increased denials, eventually hurting the bottomline.

Dealing with Tough Times

A viable solution to cope with such a sudden surge lies in strategic offshore outsourcing of the Urgent Care billing service. It’s no wonder that a rapidly growing number of urgent care facilities are outsourcing their urgent care billing operations to dedicated, third-party billers. The main advantage in doing so lies in the instant reduction of the billing burden on the in-house staff, along with a distinct decrease in operational expenses. Many such billing service providers offer dedicated services on an hourly pay model (such as a fixed low rate which is charged on a per hour basis), or on a fixed percentage of the total amount of revenue generated by them. It’s a mutually beneficial situation, especially in the latter model where they get paid only when they are able to get your bills cleared.