We’ve been providing billing services for anesthesiologists for over 40 years. Our clients are smart folks.
So it always astounds us when we see anesthesiologists making basic business errors when it comes to selecting a billing company.
Here’s the flawed decision-making process that you shouldn’t follow when picking a billing company:
Lowest Service Costs = Least Money Spent = More Money for Me
Sure, at first glance, it seems to make sense and if the services being provided were purely in the expense category it would (leaving issues of service aside) BUT billing companies are also filling in your top line too.
So while it’s always good to be frugal with expenses (including with billing services) it makes no sense to risk/sacrifice revenue by 10% for the sake of lowering expenses by 1%.
Going with a discount billing company is like deciding to sell your house with a bad realtor because they only take 2.5% of the sale price… but a good realtor can get you 10-15% more for the house by finding more prospects and doing a better job of negotiation.
What you want to do to maximize your take-home is:
Maximize: Revenue – Service Cost
Here, revenue is on an equal footing with service cost. Except that it isn’t. Because the difference between a discount billing service and an “expensive” billing service is 1-2 percentage points. The difference between what a dedicated biller and what a mediocre biller will bring in in terms of revenue is 10-15 percentage points.
That’s not even considering the better service, reporting, and value-added services that a boutique billing service like Fusion Anesthesiology offers its clients.
If you’re working with a “discount” billing service, we would likely charge you more money as a percentage of revenue than they do. However, we consistently find that our diligent processes and secret sauce increase revenue for new clients by 5-15%.
We realize that it’s easy to make this claim and somewhat harder to believe it. So we’ve developed an easy way to show you exactly where your current biller is missing legitimate revenue.