We’re sorry. You lost a client today and they signed up with us. We don’t like to see any billing service struggle to survive. We sincerely don’t like to take a client away from another billing service. There are plenty of new doctors and offices that decide they can’t handle in-house billing any more to try to take a client from another service. But one of your clients called me and asked how I would handle a certain situation.
Please let me tell you why it happened. Your client explained that she called you, her billing service, and asked why they were not receiving payments on a particular patient. You didn’t know. We told her that wouldn’t happen in our office and explained our system of tracking the claims. She told us that her billing service wouldn’t call on a claim unless she called and asked them to. Basically all your service is offering is submission of the initial claim. Anything else is extra work for you.
She went on to tell me that if the office asks the billing service for a report it is weeks before they bring it in. Weeks!! That is totally unacceptable. If the provider requires a report, you should run that report that day and fax it over. They asked for the report because they want it not so they can ask you about it again next week.
STOP!! You have to change that. You are called a billing service because you offer a service. If you offer only the service of submitting the claims, it’s not much of a service. You need to understand that other billing services are offering more than that and you need to step up to compete.
Submitting the claims is only a small part of the job you can offer your clients. Every time you find something else you can do for your clients, you solidify your relationship with them. Tracking your claims is just as important as submitting them. You must start running and working regular aging reports. You need to get a system in place for tracking your claims. You need to be reading your electronic reports and correcting any problems. You need to be reporting regularly to your clients about any problems you are encountering.
We hear enough about billing services providing poor service. Let’s all step it up a little and do a better job for our providers. We offer a valuable service when done properly. Most medical offices are much too busy to handle the billing portion of the work. Make sure you have everything under control with great systems in place for not only submitting your claims, but for tracking them, too.
If your providers are not getting the service that other billing services provide, they may not be happy. They may call me tomorrow.
