When to Use a Billing Company

Private practice is rewarding, fulfilling and very demanding. The vast majority of clinicians seek out private practice work because it offers flexibility, independence and a way to fully express one’s professional identity in the context of what motivated them to pursue this career: patient care. Early on, things can seem fairly simple and easy to balance. As you stay in practice for a few years, your residual administrative burden grows and you find that you are doing more and more tasks that you never envisioned spending your time on. You stop taking breaks and lunches, and spend your time fielding calls to insurers and previous clients needing statements or disputing problems that arose with their insurance coverage. It’s easy to find yourself feeling burned out and arriving home exhausted each day. We’re here to help

Here are some of the reasons clinicians seek out the help of a professional billing provider:

You Want To “Just Be a Clinician”:

Remember the best part of internship? Your cases were tough, but you really got to have the mental space to focus on them. There were probably less demands at home, less responsibilities at your training site than you have now, and you were less constrained by the financial realities of private practice. We want you to get back to that, but in the context of where you are now. If you are reading this, we can assume that you don’t love working with insurance companies. You don’t hang around the office hoping to sit on hold to check on an unpaid claim you discovered from last year. You don’t enjoy hauling a Medicare application down to Starbucks. Let us do that. It costs more in your billable time to manage those things than it does to have us onboard. See your clients and go home……let us handle the in-between.

Hiring a Billing Company Means Less Problem Solving In Your Day:

Working in the world of mental health insurance often entails a never-ending list of issues to sort out with third-party payers and software companies. Claims get denied for arbitrary reasons, EHR systems get updated and have quirks in how they handle claims and remittance, and no two insurance companies are the same when you need to call with an issue. If you often have the thought “what fire do I have to put out today”, and your’re not referring to a clinical one, than you’re wise to consider having some support.

Billing Companies Can Increase Revenue:

Resilience started as the billing division of a large private practice. We know the insurance market, and we know how to build caseloads. We also know that you didn’t go to graduate school to learn about finance management. We can help suggest policies, advertising adjustments and help you with your online presence as a way to increase the cashflow into your practice. A good billing company does more than send claims, they help you succeed, and get you doing more of what you like to do at work.

Billing Companies Buffer Financial Tension With Clients:

The single biggest source of client dissatisfaction comes from issues around payment. A distressed client may be initially willing to take financial responsibility, but then may become angry and resentful if their insurer denies payment, and they become responsible. It is tremendously helpful to the therapeutic relationship to have some subtle distance from the billing process. When conflict between the patient and the insurer arise, it is often very useful to have an ally willing to redirect that tension away from the therapy relationship. One of the benefits of choosing Resilience is that we are deeply rooted in the practice of counseling and psychological services, and make an ideal partner for your patient-focused private practice.

You Hire a Billing Company to Handle Staffing Demands:

Recruiting, interviewing and vetting administrative staff is one of the most time consuming aspects of private practice. When it comes to the duties associated with managing billing, training staff can take months. There is a tremendous amount of information to learn about insurance coverage, HIPAA, confidentiality laws, etc. When you have turnover, it can be particularly burdensome. Utilizing a billing company provides staffing stability. Your time spent with administrative staff is spent on patient interaction, rather than the behind-the-scenes details of account management, and employee turnover is less likely, and less burdensome.

You Want To Streamline Your Work, But You’re Not A Technology Buff:

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, there has been more and more pressure on healthcare providers to adopt electronic record systems. It’s intimidating if you haven’t been through a few of them. You want things to be easier, and for your note writing to take less effort, but it feels like a lot to take on. Resilience Billing is not only familiar with the claims-focused features of most mental-health focused systems, we are very familiar with the clinical side too. Learning how to adopt the right EHR system can make your whole process run smoother: Scheduling, note taking and submitting charges to the billing company can all get done before you leave for the day. You can also sequester all of your patient communications into a secure, HIPAA compliant emailing system, and keep your main professional email account clear of sensitive patient information. We can help you choose a system, and can help you construct a plan to migrate from your current system, or from you paper and pen chart system.