More doctors nationwide are choosing to contract out or outsource their medical billing needs. This means that professionals training today have even more options to build a solid medical billing career! As a medical billing professional, you will typically provide services to specialty physician groups and primary care practices and process Medicare, Medicaid and private health insurance claims – and working with a third-party billing company is no different.
The Department of Health and Human Services defines third party billing companies as “providing a valuable service to providers and suppliers who seek out their help in submitting claims correctly and efficiently. These firms vary greatly, performing a wide variety of services from simply formatting claims for submission to Medicare and private insurance companies to managing the entire ‘business end’ of provider practices.”
In addition to seeing that health care providers get paid for their services, billing professionals who work in a third-party billing setting usually offer a wide range of functions. In fact, in this career, you will perform many of the same extensive duties as an in-house medical biller:
- Manage patient data – demographic and incurred charges
- Prepare insurance claims
- Follow up on unpaid claims
- Post payments
- Bill patients for deductibles and co-insurance
- And more
Third party billing companies have a long and storied history, but larger-sized billing companies did not become more commonplace until the 1980s when it was required that hospital-based physicians’ services be billed separately. Today, according to statistics by the Healthcare Billing and Management Association (HBMA) third party medical billing companies employ nearly 20,000 people nationwide and process more than 17 million claims per month.
Partnering with a third-party Medical Billing Company can help health care providers increase cash flow and productivity, as well as enable them to concentrate on health care services, not on collecting bills. This means that as a medical biller, you have many options to create a solid future in the health care industry. Joining a third party billing company is yet another way to apply your medical billing training and create the medical billing career you’ve always wanted.
Source : http://www.medicalbillingcourses.com/blog/2010/03/even-more-options-for-your-medical.html
