Shutting down your practice's in-house medical billing department and moving it to an outside provider can help significantly reduce your expenses. It eliminates the staffing and training costs that are a necessary part of running your own in-house billing department. However, outsourcing your patient billing services can bring your practice other benefits as well. Outsourcing your billing needs can improve your patients' overall experiences with your practice. To find out how outsourcing can improve patient satisfaction, read on.

Facilitates Easier Patient Communication

A small practice with in-house billing may be limited to answering patient billing questions during the practice's operating hours. If a patient works all day and can't easily find time to call your practice, they may become frustrated. This can negatively affect their experience with your practice, and it can also delay revenue collection.

Outsourcing your practice's patient billing services improves patient communication due to its larger staff pool. Many outsourced services will answer calls at any time of the day, allowing your patients to easily contact them if they have questions about their bills. It's also common for outsourced patient billing services to offer a payment portal, which allows your patients to quickly pay their bills online.

Reduces Billing Errors

One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing your practice's patient billing services is that it will provide you access to a talented group of medical billers and coders. This helps reduce medical billing errors like double charges and denied insurance claims. Having an insurance claim denied can be a very frustrating experience for patients, especially when they were told that their insurance would cover a procedure. Reducing the likelihood of medical billing errors helps to keep your patients happy because your billing process will be more smooth.

Allows You to Spend Revenue on Other Services

You're able to use the money that you save by outsourcing your practice's patient billing services on improvements that can increase patient satisfaction. You can make upgrades to your waiting room or hire more medical assistants to make sure your patients don't have to wait on hold if they call your practice. Without a need for in-house patient billing, you also have the opportunity to renovate the area where it was located and use it for another purpose, such as a special waiting room for parents with young children. Keeping them isolated from the rest of your patients can reduce the noise in your waiting room while the children can play.

As you can see, outsourcing your practice's patient billing services has more benefits than solely saving your practice money. It can improve your practice's patient experience by providing them with a more convenient way to communicate with you about their billing questions, and it can also help them from encountering frustrating billing errors and denied claims. If your practice uses in-house billing and you're considering outsourcing, search for a patient billing service provider and select one that will be convenient for both you and your patients to use.