What Role Do Employees Play in Growing Your Medical Billing Company?

For solo and very small medical practices, outsourcing medical billing is often the only reasonable option. A solo practice won’t typically have enough volume to keep a billing employee busy, and the rest of the small team likely has too much to do to take billing on as a ‘night job.’

But what if your billing service is trying to attract new business from larger practices—perhaps even practices that currently have their own billing teams? Understanding your prospects’ decision-making process is critical to attracting their attention (and retaining their business once you have it).

In our consulting work, practice managers and physician owners often ask us, “Should we outsource our billing?” They expect that there might be a rule of thumb, a surefire way to decide without making a mistake. We usually advise them to look at a number of factors, with talent at the top of the list.

When a practice starts looking at outsourcing, it’s often because they don’t feel their in-house team has the necessary skills to maximize revenue today, and to keep up with changes at the CMS and private health plans tomorrow.  So they may start to wonder, would it be less risky to work with a billing service, so that we could tap into a network of dedicated billing experts?

This is absolutely the right question to ask. Even if a practice administrator or physician owner strongly prefers to keep billing inside the practice, their internal team won’t be able to do as good a job as an excellent billing service could if they can’t attract the right talent.

Having an excellent team with superior billing knowledge is the best way to attract new clients—and make your service indispensable to current ones. And it’s the key to retaining clients, too. When practices get access to a team that’s much better than one they could hope to assemble on their own, they’re much less likely to ever want to leave your service.

The way you hire, train, use, and retain your staff can be the difference between a billing company that simply survives and one that continues to grow and thrive!