Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Amazing Charts Billing SVC

We are a small two person practice, and thinking about out billing options.

Anyone out there use the "out-sourced" AC service that runs 5%?

How about maybe even a brief billing success story so I don't lose hope.

Actually the last time I looked they had a choice of 4 services. I switched about 1.5 years ago to MTBC and they have worked.

While they are based in NJ most of their support is out of Pakistan. English is good and not a big problems but sometimes they do not follow up on things promptly. It took them 9 months to get BCBS straight but they had Medicaid running quickly and it has quirky billing.

I am waiting for V6 before I switch.

Do your billing in house! I'm biased because I started doing this when I started using AC. It has been great. Things don't fall through the cracks, aging reports get worked up, etc. You do figure out how crooked insurance companies are and how amazing it is the reasons they don't pay you.

The only problem is that I am much closer to the business side of things now and tend to give way too many self-pay patients a break. I need to stay out of that part of it and let my office manager deal with those issues.

Having trouble finding someone in house. We run medisoft and fewer people know how to use it. Plus it costs too much to run IMOP, with regular "upgrades" to do the same function.

Local services charge 8% on average around here, and a number of my patients may not like Pakistani speakers to be honest.

I'm in Florida also, but I don't have trouble with the Middle Eastern accents. We have trouble with you Midwesterners -- y'all just talk too fast...

I have been using MTBC since 2008 and am planning on getting Amazing Charts. How do you send the info to MTBC? Which calendar do you use?

We go to billing and download the data to a simpletext file that is then sent by FTP to their servers. It will "scrub" the data a little bit and ask if DOB, guarantor or such demographic data is not filled in. If all the data elements are present, it only takes a couple minutes.

On their end they then go through the claims and electronically submit. Seems like they get them out within a week, probably sooner, I haven't really followed their submission pattern.

If you are submitting PDFs now, I would suspect it is pretty similar.

THe only problem with outsourcing is that no one works your claims, and you'll lose up to 20% of collections...

When I started with Amazing Charts in 2005, I decided to use their billing service. I was so unhappy with their service and collections after 4-5 months, that I had a local billing company take over. Their fee is higher than 5%, but the service has been exemplary.

They (MTBC) do work the claims and send out billing statements, but they are not always consistent. You can easily track your accounts receivable and push them to rework the claims, or to go to collections or write off.

I disagree that in-house is best. As an AC biller, we get rejections and work them in 24-48 hours from submission. Factually, no practice can do it all, and most of the AC users that come looking have either gotten in a pickle on their own, are being held hostage by either an in-house or outside biller, or are getting bled dry by a biller. The reality is that when you do a reality check on your in-house billing costs, (truly tracking your expenses and costs) you're better off outsourcing. And losing 20% of your collections? No way.

When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Here in the real world, many of us are successful businessmen and ladies who have brought billing in-house where we can monitor every penny, hound every dead-beat payor, perform ongoing reviews of our contracts and weed-out the dead wood. We have learned to operate lean and mean and demand fair payment for fair work. Having billers with nursing backgrounds has been a great benefit. They know what you coded, but also what you probably should have also coded, but forgot. Having instant access to chart notes in office means more correct coding and higher reimbursement. Our notes are done and charges sent out before we leave the office at the end of each day.

When we went solo, the group practice manager said medical management was too complicated to do all by yourself.

When we started doing our own billing, the billing company said the same thing.

It's been ten years.

In the 23 years I have been in practice,the biggest detriments to my financial success have been #1 practicing in a group where none of the docs could agree on any thing, #2 having an office manager who felt it was her job to "protect me" from the business side of medicine, including personnel issues, and #3 outsourced billing for all the reasons detailed above by Dave.