How to Build a Streamlined Urgent Care Billing Process

Probing into Urgent Care billing

If one were to treat Urgent Care billing with the same degree of importance as medical billing in general, be sure to be meeting with some unpleasant surprises. The two, in spite of their apparent similarities, have some very significant differences. Due to the unplanned, ambulatory and, if one might add, the ‘urgent’ nature of Urgent Care services, the billing desk is required to be on their toes to collect every necessary bit of information the moment a patient walks into a facility. Losing out on this opportunity can pose serious problems afterwards as missed out information can get very difficult to retrieve once the patient has walked out of the facility.

Even after all the requisite data have been collected, many Urgent Care centers falter when it comes to coding correctly and accurately for the services rendered. It is worthwhile to remember that using the wrong codes can lead to reduced compensation by the insurance companies and even, in extreme cases, a total rejection of the submitted claim.

Broadly speaking, a successful and efficient Urgent Care billing process can be deemed as one that 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, such billers are quite hard to come by nowadays, 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 a fully armed billing desk more expensive than ever.

Building a More Streamlined Billing Process

The key to the problem lies in building an efficient and highly streamlined billing process. However, this also needs to be done keeping overall economy in mind. This is why a growing number of Urgent Care facilities are opting to outsource their billing operations to external billing agencies. In most cases, such agencies, operating on a remote assistance model, are able to provide excellent billing support at a rate that is remarkably lower than the local U.S. market.

One of the largest benefits of engaging an external medical billing company is that it lets Urgent Care businesses gain instant access to a wide pool of fully trained and highly skilled medical billing personnel who are ready to start working for them on a dedicated basis at the drop of the hat. It also saves them 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 suitable infrastructure, and provide employee benefits and so on.