If you run a medical practice, you’ll need to consider how to handle billing. Billing and coding responsibilities are serious business and you’ll need to have someone who knows what they’re doing. Otherwise, you’ll end up with angry patients and insurance providers demanding answers. The first decision you need to make is whether to outsource your medical billing or hire someone to do it in-house. A hospitalist billing service will take care of your company’s billing for a price. You’ll be one of their clients. So while you’ll receive professional results, the service won’t answer to you and it won’t be personalized to your practice’s needs. However, it might be cheaper and it will save you the trouble of putting someone on payroll to do your billing and coding services.

However, it might make more sense for your practice to hire someone directly. If you do this, it will likely cost you more upfront. Billing coding medical terms and procedures can take a little while to learn and your new hire will likely need to be trained if they aren’t already. There might be billing coding classes free near you, but make sure that they are legitimate.

If a physician isn’t comfortable outsourcing medical billing services to a medical billing company, there is always the option of handling billing issues within the organization using some form of medical billing software. Proper medical billing software can be used to keep costs down if for whatever reason retaining the services of a third party that specializes in medical billing isn’t feasible. If a physician is confident that they are capable of handling processing claims in house, quality medical billing software might be a sound investment, and may end up being much more cost effective in the long term.

When considering the costs of medical billing software, however, it’s important to consider them all. In addition to the software itself, a physician seeking to handle billing within the organization will most likely also need to hire one or more employees specialized in medical billing. There is also the possibility that new medical billing software will require additional hardware added to the computer system capable of running it, but this is not always necessarily the case. There are also various miscellaneous costs associated with handling medical billing yourself, such as an increased need for office space and the cost of statement paper. Obviously, the pros and cons for employing some form of medical billing software versus outsourcing medical billing services will vary from organization to organization, but the potential to save money by handling billing in house is certainly there.