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You have invested in cutting edge medical billing technology. You brought in a high priced expert to make sure the system was implemented correctly. This should start the money flowing in, unless you have a group of mediocre medical billers. You need a world class medical billing team. Putting such a team in place requires four components:

1) Installing a well-defined and predictable method for recruiting, identifying, hiring and keeping great medical billers:

Medical billing is a critical function and the process for finding and selecting medical billing employees must reflect the criticality of the job. You would not hire an accountant or an attorney based upon a few questions about what they liked or did not like about previous jobs, you should not hire medical billers with any less rigorous a process. Install multiple interviews and multiple testing levels. Test for billing knowledge, work style and work effort. Check references and check criminal history.

Once you have great people on the team you must develop them in order to keep them excited and make them focus on continuous improvement. Less skilled individuals should see a clear path to more responsibility and pay. All medical billers should receive training on the changes that occur each year in the medical billing field.

If you do not remove weak performers from your team they will demoralize the entire group and will bring most people down to their level of performance. It is. Unfortunately true, that on bad apple can spoil the bunch. Each year remove the weakest members of the team based upon clear performance metrics.

2) Specialize the billing team: The top billing organizations’ billing team is composed of dedicated specialists in demographic data entry, charge posting, payment posting, insurance follow up, and patient collections. Each position is designed to excel in its role and is properly supervised and incentivized.

3) Supply your billing team with strong data driven analysis: This rings back to the “You can’t manage what you do not measure” message. Your team cannot systematically improve their performance or your billing without in-depth measurements of how billers behave and how the billing process is working.

4) Compensate your medical billing specialists based upon performance, not effort: Your billing department should succeed when the practice succeeds. Many good billing systems have been undermined by a compensation approach that does not give the medical billing team the proper motivation to doggedly and efficiently pursue the practice’s claims. Remember to insure the compensation system falls with the OIG’s guidelines.

Utilizing these concepts will allow you to assemble and grow a medical billing team that will be capable of utilizing a great medical billing process to deliver powerful results.

Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II