Starting a Medical Billing Business > Starting Your Own Medical Billing Business
Analyze this
Michele:
Hey Williamportor, I missed these two questions:
--- Quote from: williamportor on September 19, 2017, 02:53:44 PM ---
* Should I charge extra for a client that sends me 200-300 old unpaid EOB's to call on and/or resubmit? If so, how much?
--- End quote ---
ABSOLUTELY! Old work is harder than clean work and takes more time. Are they giving you the EOBs with denials? So basically you would go through, determine what went wrong and if it can be fixed and resubmit any that can be resubmitted? You need to estimate how long that would take you and bill accordingly. For example, without knowing the specialty and the types of problems they run into I would make a very rough guess that 200 unpaid claims would take me approximately 12-16 hours. Then I would multiply that by my hourly charge. You should NOT be doing that kind of work for free.
--- Quote from: williamportor on September 19, 2017, 02:53:44 PM ---* What would you folks charge for direct mail billing of cash customers? I'm charging $11.75 for 3 months (3 invoices)
--- End quote ---
Are you talking about patient billing for self pay patients? We don't charge like that. We include the patient billing in with our total flat monthly fee. But it costs us about $.74 per patient statement to send (we use an online statement service which cuts our cost). You need to know how much it costs you to actually send the statement. When we hand mailed them ourselves our cost was around $1.00 for materials (stamp, envelopes, printing, paper). So if it costs you $1.00 then up to $3.00 is the actual cost of the statements and you are getting $8.75 for your time. The issue is what do you do if the patient is making payments? So if they owe $150 and you send out 2 statements and then they send in $25. Then you mail another statement and they pay another $25 and so on. When do you stop sending statements? At 3? Also, how do you handle if they are coming in on a regular basis? So they need continuous statements? Isn't there a way you can include that in your flat monthly fee without separating it out?
PMRNC:
--- Quote ---* What would you folks charge for direct mail billing of cash customers? I'm charging $11.75 for 3 months (3 invoices)
--- End quote ---
I do same as Michele, all work is included in the flat monthly fee because it's based on average of hours worked so that all services are inclusive and I get paid for all work I do.
Additionally it's much easier to do this way because you are not nickle and diming the client and it's less to track which also takes time doing monthly reports/invoicing. It would be same if you were doing a % of collections since all the services involve the revenue stream they should be included. Even when I did a % years ago, I charged a % of TOTAL practice revenue, NOTHING was broken out... if I touched it (statements, reports, etc) than I got paid. I found that those clients that wanted to NOT pay for cash patient's simply didn't understand the concept of working an account from billed charges to mailing statements. OR they wanted to control that portion themselves, to which I would always remind them it's NEVER a good idea to have two sets of books. Usually that got them to understand how it benefited them to have me do all of the work including statements even to cash patients. I have never had a practice with cash patients who didn't have many that still didn't pay at time of service and needed statements to go out. Not to mention charging a different fee for different services usually added up to more work at the end of the month.
williamportor:
I do same as Michele, all work is included in the flat monthly fee because it's based on average of hours worked so that all services are inclusive and I get paid for all work I do.
This all sounds great, but if you have no idea how much time it's going to take to do the work, how do you decide how much to charge??
Michele:
That's tough but you just have to estimate. Most eligibilty checks can be done online. We don't do a lot of eligibility checking but I would say it takes about 2-3 minutes to do an average online check. So I would guestimate that I could do 20-30 an hour. If you are doing multiple BC and you are logged into the BC website it takes less than 2-3 minutes, and some phone calls will take more, but it should even out. Also check with your clearinghouse. OA allows eligibility checks as well. Many PM systems have eligibility checking as part of the system. You may be able to streamline it.
williamportor:
--- Quote from: Michele on October 12, 2017, 09:49:12 AM ---That's tough but you just have to estimate. Most eligibilty checks can be done online. We don't do a lot of eligibility checking but I would say it takes about 2-3 minutes to do an average online check. So I would guestimate that I could do 20-30 an hour. If you are doing multiple BC and you are logged into the BC website it takes less than 2-3 minutes, and some phone calls will take more, but it should even out. Also check with your clearinghouse. OA allows eligibility checks as well. Many PM systems have eligibility checking as part of the system. You may be able to streamline it.
--- End quote ---
OK. I get it. Sorry to ask so many questions, but where most people here worked in insurance companies, doctor's offices etc. before becoming medical billers, I knew next to nothing about it. I'm now entering the intermediate part of the business, in that I now have a client base, and now have to learn to become a decent medical biller. I cannot thank you enough for the help. You folks are priceless! :)
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