Being a physician requires so much more than just healing your patients. A physician has to oversee the business, manage the office, and make sure the the billing operations are running efficiently to stay afloat.


One decision that every medical provider has to decide on is whether to utilize outsourced billing or to use electronic billing software to process billing in-house. There are advantages and disadvantages to both options, but some of the reasons physicians opt to use outsourced billing include:

1. When in-house billing has declined in efficiency. If your office is seeing longer delays in receiving payments, and an increase in collections, you might find an outsourced billing solution beneficial. Research has shown that using a third-party that specializes in billing rather than doing it in-house reduces the time it takes to receive a payment by one to three days, and results in lower rates of unpaid collections.
2. Your office is experiencing high turnover rates. While healing is your craft, collecting payments is your source of livelihood. If you are frequently cycling through employees who run your billing, the constant hiring and training process can interrupt billing efficiency. When you outsource billing services, the burden of hiring, training, and maintaining billing staff is not your headache.
3. You are not interested in joining the tech world. If you keep your billing in-house, you will need practice management software. While such software isn’t impossible to assimilate to, if you aren’t interested in training your staff on it, dealing with software updates, occasional downtime, and tech support, you might prefer using an outsourced billing solution.
4. Your practice still has its baby teeth. If your practice is barely learning how to walk on its own, you might prefer to entrust the billing and management of your business with a third party so that you can focus on building your practice instead of hiring, training, and maintaining billing staff.
5. You want to focus on healing. Chances are, you joined the medical field to help people. You probably didn’t get through medical school to stress about the business-side of running an office. If billing, insurance claim, paperwork and managing clerical services is not what you’re interested in doing, you might prefer to use a third-party for the billing side of the business so that you can focus on your medical services.

Conclusion
While our information today covers the benefits of using outsourced billing providers, it’s important to add that a third-party billing provider is not a magic pill that will fix your practice. It’s important to find a billing provider who aligns with your business philosphy, and that you partner with them to improve efficiency in your office.


Does your medical office process billing in-house, or do you use a third-party billing solution? How do you feel about the billing process your office uses? Please share your experience in the comment section below.