Manuel,
Welcome.
I'm assuming you are a solo practitioner. Using a billing service makes a lot of sense. We are a 4 provider practice which IMHO is about the tipping point for going it alone.
There is a break even point out there where having your own biller is better. There are a lot of caveats to this. If your talent pool is large, then finding a good biller can be straight forward. If not, it can be awful. We are lucky in having found good talent.
I have been in practice almost 40 years. Having used billing services in the past there are some other issues James only touched on. Assume for a moment you own a billing service. You get 6% of whatever number. You need to minimize your own overhead, so you hire the minimum number of people you need to maximize your profits. Now, you have invoices provided by a number of practices. Some are primary care, billing a fairly large number of low cost items. Some are medical specialties, billing high-cost procedures. Your staff is busy (because you hired the minimum number, remember), and has to put their efforts someplace. Are you going to direct them to focus on collecting 50 99213's, or on 10 surgeries at $3,000 each?
This is what we hit more than once, as a primary care provider. The billing companies would promise to give equal effort to every claim. Reality, however, was quite different, and impossible to police. All I can say for sure is that with a 4 provider office, we come out way ahead having a billing person who answers to us alone.
