How to pick a medical biller for you and your physical therapy clinic

Once you’ve made the choice to outsource your billing needs to a medical biller, below are the 5 things you should look for when choosing a medical biller for your clinic.

1) Look for a billing company who specializes in physical therapy billing

It’s important to find a biller who has experience with billing in your specific vertical. Each medical speciality has different nuances to it so experience with physical therapy billing is important.

One Body’s billers have a combination of 40 years experience in billing for physical therapy and chiropractic clinics.

2) Make sure you talk to the person who is actually going to do your billing

You should always know who is actually going to be responsible for your billing. Many companies you only talk to the person who sells medical billing, but you should always ask to talk to the person who is going to submit your claims and call insurance companies on your behalf.

At One Body, you interface directly with the biller who is working on your billing needs. We want to make sure you develop a relationship with your biller so you can rely on them for all your billing needs and trust they have you taken care of!

3) Always ask about experience

When you talk to a biller, always ask how many years of experience they have. Billing is a tedious process so when you’ve been doing billing for a long time, you have very valuable knowledge that those who just started wouldn’t have.

4) Ask how they stay up to date on changes in medical billing policies

Billing policies are constantly changing so its important that billers are constantly keeping up with the latest policies and trends in billing. You should always ask how billers stay up to date with industry standards.

5) Ask for references

It’s important to always talk to some of the billler’s existing clients. Ask clients how responsive billers are and if they noticed their recoupment of reimbursements increase after they handed their billing to them.

6) Reporting

It’s really important to ask about reporting. When do you get reports from your biller? How frequent are you getting the reports? What do the reports include? Even though you are outsourcing billing, it’s helpful if you understand how to read the reports. In addition, you want to ask the biller if she/he gives you insights on how to improve or increase % collected.

At One Body, we are extremely data driven. Not only do we provide the data to you, we also analyze that data and give you insights and suggestions on how to increase your % collected from the insurance companies.

7) Customer service

You should always ask if and how you are able to reach the biller. If you have questions related to billing, its important that you have direct access to the billers.

8) Other included services

Will the biller talk to patients if patients have questions about bills? Will the biller help with verification of benefits or preauthorizations? It’s helpful when billers provide these services as you are able to outsource 100% of billing if the biller provides these additional services. If they don’t your front desk may have to do these which takes up time and shifts their attention away from patient care.

One Body includes all of these services, talking to patients, verification of benefits and submission of preauthorizations so we are able to take all of these services off of your hands.

9) Do they require you to use a specific software?

A lot of billers have only used one specific billing portal and require their clients to use it in order to take them on as a client. At One Body, we are EMR and billing portal agnostic. We are able to work with any billing portal and any EMR.

If you are interested in learning more about One Body, feel free to reach out or fill out the contact form.