Home Medical Billing

Home Medical Billing

People aren't getting any younger. This fact should lead you the inevitable conclusion that healthcare is no more needed than it is today.

The Labor Statistics states in their recent report that third-party and home medical billing is one of the twenty most popular occupations in the healthcare industry. This is perhaps brought on by the emergence of HMOs, PPOs, POs, and health insurance plans.

The average medical practice today spends about $500,000 on liability costs per annum, which may include law suits. Home medical billing is classed as "defensive medicine" in that it helps reduce these costs and prevent you from adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to your balance sheets at the end of every year.

What is Home Medical Billing?

There are two types of home medical billing. These are the Electronic Billing (which handles claims processing electronically) and Full Service Billing.

In electronic home medical billing, every time a doctor sees a patient, a sheet is filled out with information about the diagnosis, procedure, price, and so on. Then, this sheet is faxed out to you or the doctor's office will ask you to pick it up. Afterwards, you will enter the data contained in the sheet into your software program and send it to a clearinghouse via modem. It is the clearinghouse that will send the data to various insurance companies so your client, the doctor, will get compensation for his services and he, in turn, will compensate you for your services.

In full service home medical billing, the process is a little different. Full service home medical billing also does electronic claims processing too but majority of the work involves printing and mailing patient statements, posting insurance and patient payments to patient's accounts, doing follow-ups on unpaid accounts and insurance, answering patient inquiries about their accounts, and producing several month end reports for the doctors.

Both types of home medical billing are good as far as doing the job is concerned. However, it should be noted that the Health Care Financing Administration, or HCFA, has mandated that Medicare claims be sent electronically. So although paper claims are still generally accepted at the federal level, the changing times seem to call out for the convenience and the speed of electronic home medical billing.

Home medical billing is not that expensive to get into. The start-up costs are generally low, varying only depending on the computer equipment or software package you purchase and use.