Outsourced Medical Billing #KareoChat on Twitter

On Thursday, August 27th at 9 AM PT (Noon ET), I’ll be hosting the #KareoChat where we’ll be discussing the good and bad of outsourced medical billing. You can follow along tomorrow on Twitter by watching the #KareoChat hashtag or by checking out my tweets on @ehrandhit.
Outsourced Medical Billing Twitter Chat
Here are the questions we’ll be discussing in tomorrow’s Twitter chat:

  1. Why are many practices choosing outsourced billing over in house?
  2. What are the disadvantages of outsourced billing?
  3. How will ACOs and value based reimbursement work with an outsourced billing company?
  4. How do you select a high quality outside billing company? What differentiates these companies?
  5. Does your outsourced billing company need to have tight integration with your EHR? Why or why not?
  6. What are the pros and cons of outsourcing your billing to your EHR vendor?

I’m particularly interested in people’s responses to question number 3. I think many in healthcare understand the good and bad of doing the billing in house or outsourcing it. Although, I’m pretty sure I’ll learn even more on the Twitter chat tomorrow. However, how things like ACOs and value based reimbursement will impact an outsourced billing company is still a really important topic of discussion. Will it drive more people towards outsourcing their billing or will it mean more practices bring their billing in house? I’ll be interested to hear people’s thoughts on tomorrow’s Twitter chat or feel free to start the discussion in the comments below.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • A very interesting question you raised. My company is a PQRS registry and we report all types of quality (value based reporting) across the board to all types of provider organizations. I can tell you that hardly any of the billing companies I come across – actually, at this point in time, NONE, offer any support for PQRS or eCQM when combined with PQRS. It is going to be a mess out there. everyone is looking at ICD10 and understandably, but with value based reporting via quality measures covering 30% of medicare reimbursements in 2016 and 50% by 2018, I am amazed at the lack of attention billing companies are giving this topic. quality is the new “healthcare dollar” and billing companies are supposed to support and enhance revenue, so why is this off their radars?

    I think there is going to be a major billing company shake out but I don’t see billing trending to being back inhouse. It will be interesting. maybe a period of registry mergers with billing companies is on the horizon.

  • Lou,
    Registry and billing companies. Interesting. I wouldn’t say that all billing companies have ignored PQRS. Many EHR vendors are billing companies as well and many of them have done a lot of work with PQRS.

  • yes. I was focusing on billing companies who have core mission of billing, not emr companies who also do billing but concentrate on clinical documentation or clinical process as core. sidenote on the emr vendors that do billing, there is big differenes between reporting ecqm in attestation as compared to pqrs. this so called “once” reporting is filled with traps and gaps along the way. Lo hi

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