Medical billers and medical billing services are the financial life blood of a practice. Practices that do not have the right medical billing expertise in their corner can easily lose more than 20 percent of their practice's potential revenue.

As physicians are considering the use of medical billing servers to stop the hemorrhaging of cash from their practices, they are faced with a broad range of options. On the small end of the spectrum are individuals working from their homes. On the opposite end of the spectrum are companies that employ hundreds of medical billers and have thousands of clients.

Medical billing is a highly complex area and it requires experience-based knowledge and expertise to contend with insurance companies. When it comes to surgical billing, the situation gets even more complex. Such complexity can be handled only by a company that is staffed with well trained surgery billing professionals. The medical billing specialist must be familiar with the specific codes and rules that make up the world of surgery billing.

The choice of an experience billing provider has become all the more important for surgeons as they watch their cost rocket upwards. With their margins shrinking they must be confident that their surgical billing service is collecting every dollar the surgeon is owed.  Selecting the proper medical billing service is made all the more difficult by the fact that many companies claiming to be experts in billing for surgeons actually do not do the billing themselves, but outsource the work to other vendors that are based in India or work from their homes.

One of the major drawbacks of hiring a company that does not specialize in surgical billing is their lack of familiarity with the procedures and the terminologies used. Even if the medical billing company serves one or two surgeons, they will lack the depth and breadth of expertise required for successful surgery billing. Moreover if the hired company does not specialize in billing for surgeons, then they will not have the expertise to effectively appeal denied claims or answer questions raised by the insurance companies.

Good surgery billing requires the ability to track underpayments. This is more complicated than typical medical billing because of the rules around multiple-procedures. This complication often exceeds the capabilities of the billing software used by generalist billing companies. This is a critical failing since proper pursuit of underpayments can increase a surgeon's collections by 7 to 10 percent.

The surgery-driven difficulties of medical billing encompass patient billing also. A surgeon's patient balance process is more challenging because most of the balances are quite sizeable. Coupling this with the difficulties of explaining to a patient their complicated Explanation Of Benefits and the surgical terminology on their bills drives the need for patient collection specialists that have a strong expertise in surgical billing.  If patient are not handles with care surgeons will see their patient collections fall and their patient complains rise - not a good combination.

The safest way for a surgeon to navigate the medical billing land mines outlined in this article I to travel the medical billing battlefield with a surgical billing service that has deep and proven expertise in traversing the surgery billing hazards. Family doctors should not be performing surgery and generalist medical billing companies should not be providing medical billing services to surgeons. Yopu can learn more at Surgical Billing Partners' website.

Copyright 2008 by Surgical Billing Partners