Can you tell me where to find the most practical STEP BY STEP list of where/how/what to begin doing once you sign your first client?What do you do first? Second? ....and so on?
My goal is to have a side business for myself doing billing but have no clue what is required in obtaining billing info from my potential clients. Do I need to have access to their computer system to see what I need to bill for? Do most clients fax their billing sheets to their biller? If so, does the client also fax the patient ins.info and such to the biller? I guess I'm more confused as to how the biller gets all the appropriate patient info. to bill the insurance companies if the biller doesnt have access to the clients computer. I work with DBC now and collect all this info. into one part of the program which is transferred into the billing portion of the program so I'm wondering if I had a duplicate of this program as a biller on my own, would I need to enter the same patient demographics just like the client does in order to bill? Thanks in advance. Mona
You may also want to consider some type of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) in which key patient demographic/insurance data elements can be electronically uploaded from one billing system to another. I am fortunate to have a local technical guru who can build these interface "engines" (at a cost, of course) but it sure beats relying on faxes, couriers, copying face sheets and other labor-intensive tasks to obtain this critical information for the billing process. Plus it's fast, can be run automatically through scripting (for example, upload all patient demographic info from the practice management system to the billing system I use, at say, midnight each day) and your new patient data and/or changed established patient data is available the next morning. Of course, you have to test this process thoroughly and have a secure VPN but in the long run it can save a ton of time, especially if you're processing a high-volume type of practice. I personally hate to "re-key" something that already exists in some dark corner of an existing database!