Parkway Medical Services - Top Rated Medical billing services in USA

Making the Transition:

Trusting a Partner with Your Medical Billing Needs

This guide was created to smooth the transition from managing your medical billing needs in house to entrusting these daily tasks to the professionals at Parkway Services .

While this guide was created specifically to smooth the transition to Main Street Medical, it’s completeness also serves as a model for those considering whether to make the transition to another service, or to help those who are making this consideration. This document will also provide you with key questions to ask, in order to gather all of the necessary information to evaluate whether a relationship with your potential services provider will benefit your practice every bit as much as it should.

Throughout this guide, you will find steps that we recommend completing for a smooth transition into outsourcing your medical billing needs, and a description as to why we have made these recommendations. If you have questions about any part of this guide, please contact our experts at: +23923929210 or by emailing us at info@parkwaymedicalbilling

Steps to Ensure a Smooth Transition of your Medical Billing

No two medical billing services providers are the same. Each has different strengths and staff that are trained in different areas. Different providers will offer different technology solutions and price their services based on different parameters. Before you enter into a transition process or agreement with any medical billing services provider, it’s important to do your research and make sure that this relationship will benefit your practice.

What to Look for:

Medical Billing Services Provider:

Even though you might not elect to utilize all of their services at the start of your contract, choosing one with a wider array of services allows you to grow over time and leverage even more of their professional support. A larger offering of services also generally means a larger number of trained staff, which is important, as it helps to guarantee faster response times, greater expertise and more.

Experience:

The quality of work done on your behalf, by a medical billing services provider, is directly tied to their experience. At parkway Services, our staff has a combined number of over 100 years of experience.

Certified Coders:

It’s not enough to offer a trained staff of medical billing professionals. When doing your research, check to see if the third party medical billing services provider has certified coders on staff. This is a good litmus test to make sure that you are starting a relationship with someone with the knowledge and experience that you can trust.

Before taking any steps toward initiating a transition of control over your medical billing services, it is important to schedule and complete a phone call with your prospective medical billing provider. This phone call will allow you to talk through their transition process, take stock of your current workflow, to identify potential problems and opportunities

Who should be on the phone call?

When scheduling this phone call with your prospective provider, ask to have the representative(s) that will be handling your medical billing services, and their immediate supervisor on the call.

When should you schedule the phone call?

The process of transitioning your medical billing needs over to a third-party provider should be a carefully orchestrated process, meaning that taking your time to make sure that everything is done right, means less errors and lost time after the transition. You’ll want to schedule this call at least 60 days prior to the date the transition is to take place. The call will provide your team with the information they need to think through the transition, and doing this a billing cycle ahead of the actual transition will allow them to work through it, while thinking through how this third-party service will replicate their process.
On your end, think about the current process and the individuals involved. You’ll want to have at least a good representation of the team, if not the whole team (depending on the size) to be sure that no nuances or minutia are missed.

What are some key questions that you should ask on this call?

Will I have a dedicated team to work with?
How much time will take for running operations?
How I will be receiving my payments?
Who will answer patient phone calls?
What type of monthly financial reports will I receive?

Typically, a medical billing or consulting provider will ask your team to fill out a questionnaire in order to answer policy and procedure questions relating to your practice and who the appropriate contacts will be. You will have worked through much of this on the discovery phone call with your medical billing services provider in step one, but they may reserve this as a follow up step in order to be thorough. Often times, this questionnaire will spark additional thoughts or questions that you will want to ask your third-party provider along the way, in order to help smooth the transition.

Example Questions:

Who will be the main point of contact for questions regarding services, invoices, etc.?
Who will be the main point of contact regarding billing services and technical questions regarding medical billing software?
Who will be the main point of contact regarding denials and rejections?
Do you typically check a patient’s healthcare insurance the day or night before their visit to ensure coverage eligibility?
Does your medical staff have training in speaking to patients about their healthcare and insurance?
Does your front office staff have training in taking payments, speaking to patients about outstanding payments, etc.?

When you send this questionnaire back to your third party medical billing services partner, add in any questions that you might have at this time or as a result of the form. This will help to ensure that the you receive all of the information that you need, in a timely manner, so as to not lengthen the transition.

Now that both your staff, and your medical billing services partner have taken the time to get to know each other, and learn how the other works, it’s time to sit back down together to tailor products and services to your specific practice’s needs.

Pick Your Plan of Services

In the very beginning of this process, you did some research into your third party medical billing partner’s services offering. Now is the time to discuss what services you would like to explore with this partner, and how to apply them specifically to your practice, defining the workflow. This partner will discuss with you different ways in which they can aid your practice, potentially by streamlining processes, putting in place a system of checks, etc.

After you have selected and decided upon the customization of services and software to be provided, your medical billing partner will work to implement these on their side. There may be a few phone calls or meetings in between the last step and this final, fifth step but the work will be on your partner, which is why we have omitted them from this document.

Services Training:

While you are contracting a third party to handle your medical billing needs, there may be new workflows, procedures, etc. with which your current team members are unfamiliar. It’s a good idea to set up training to walk through these changes before they are implemented, in order to smooth the transition and avoid disruptions in your revenue cycle. You may elect one team member to undergo the training and then train the rest of their team so as to avoid too much of an interruption in your practice’s day to day operations.

Software Training:

Software is often an essential element of success when partnering with a third party medical billing services provided, so your team needs to be able to utilize this software to the fullest extent. From data entry, to pulling reports, software can be a powerful tool for shortening claims processing times, ensuring your patients medical data is accurate and up to date, and more. In fact, software training is such an essential element of success, that it should be scheduled before the transition, and then again on a recurring basis through the terms of the relationship. This will make sure that your team’s training doesn’t grow out of date as new updates and changes are made to the software your team is using. Parkway Services schedules trainings once the contracts are signed, and at the start of the implementation of the services and software. This ensures that our customers are ready from day one and that we are able to provide them with the best possible services. We also make sure to schedule regular training sessions to keep everyone up to date on the latest changes to services and software that we offer.

Recap

To recap what we’ve covered in this document, before entering into a relationship with a third party for your medical billing and software needs, it’s important to take the time to prepare. Through research and preparation, you can make sure that your practice gets everything that it should out of this relationship, and more importantly, that you aren’t paying for services and software that are not beneficial to your practice.

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