Good question Adil,
"Dropping to paper" sounds bad in an electronic age, but it may only mean a slight delay in processing. Still not as bad as actually billing on paper. It depends on the carrier. With one of our biggest insurers, filing electronically, we're getting paid in 6 days on average. With others, using the same method it can be weeks. A bigger issue may be outsourcing your billing. Nobody cares about your money as much as you. Billing companies and large groups with expensive administrators would like you to believe billing is just too hard for the average physician to understand. Umm... if the guy with 20 years of schooling, a doctorate level degree and mandatory annual continuing education can't do it, how come the high school grad with a $395 Medisoft program and a web page can handle it? I knew we were on to something when my "newly-trained" in-house biller came to me after the first month with $42,000 in uncollected money from secondaries that never got billed the previous year. You don't want to do the billing yourself, but find somebody in your office, or your community, that would work for you, treat them well and make sure "buy into" making the practice successful.
