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A weak medical billing staff can undermine the best technology and billing processes. Medical Billing success requires great medical billing employees. Developing a strong medical billing team is a difficult, but worthwhile effort. Here is how to make it happen:
1) Deploy a systematic approach to and dedicated resources for obtaining and developing strong employees:
Medical billing is a critical function and the process for finding and selecting medical billing employees must reflect the criticality of the job. You would not hire an accountant or an attorney based upon a few questions about what they liked or did not like about previous jobs, you should not hire medical billers with any less rigorous a process. Install multiple interviews and multiple testing levels. Test for billing knowledge, work style and work effort. Check references and check criminal history.
In addition to finding great people, you must continuously develop them. Less experienced medical billers should be continually trained so they can take over more difficult assignments. All staff must be trained in the latest changes to rules and regulations relevant for billing.
If you do not remove weak performers from your team they will demoralize the entire group and will bring most people down to their level of performance. It is. Unfortunately true, that on bad apple can spoil the bunch. Each year remove the weakest members of the team based upon clear performance metrics.
2) Focus your team members: The best medical billing processes are designed to allow individuals to specialize in specific areas such as charge posting, insurance follow-up or payment posting. Such specialization allows the individuals to become true experts capable of spotting issues quickly that billers spending their time performing multiple tasks might miss.
3) Invest heavily in analytical efforts: Continuous improvement of the billing process and the billing team requires significant and on-going analytical efforts. By measuring key factors about both payers and the billing process, a billing group can speed up collections, lower denials and lower the cost of the billing process.
4) Motivate your billing team: Utilize an OIG approved compensation system for the billing team. Aligning their interest with those of the practice is a huge source of billing improvement.
These steps provide a foundation for growing a medical billing team that will be second to none.
Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II
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