Medical billers play a crucial role in the U.S. healthcare system, ensuring providers receive timely reimbursements while managing insurance claims, claim denials, and resubmissions. Without an efficient billing team, healthcare providers risk revenue loss, legal complications from improper coding, and administrative backlogs that disrupt operations. A medical biller’s expertise helps prevent errors and delays and keeps healthcare facilities financially stable and operationally efficient.
In recent years, there has been a reported shortage of medical billers in the US. According to the American Medical Association (AMA), there is an estimated 30% gap in the workforce for medical billers. With healthcare demands on the rise, should providers rush to hire more medical billers to keep up? Or is there a smarter way to scale without the scramble?
Thankfully, to address the shortage of medical billers, healthcare organizations can integrate outsourcing team to bridge the gap. Outsourcing medical billing gives firms access to remote medical billing professionals that specialize in claims processing, compliance, and revenue cycle management. Let’s look into how outsourcing medical billing is helping healthcare organizations stay efficient amid the shortage of in-house staff.
Key Benefits of Outsourcing Medical Billing
With the ongoing medical billing staff shortage, healthcare providers must find ways to maintain smooth billing operations without overextending their in-house staff. Outsourcing is a great solution for many looking to scale up their team, all while making sure crucial medical billing tasks are covered.
1. Access to Trained and Professional Staff
High turnover rates contribute to the shortage of medical billing professionals, negatively impacting healthcare operations. On average, it takes 90 days to fill a vacant hospital position, and the average hospital lost $8.55 million due to turnover in 2022.
One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing is that it provides immediate access to skilled global talent for medical billing and coding. Outsourcing providers specialize in sourcing and hiring qualified candidates for your billing needs. They even ensure that these teams are trained and up to date on regulatory changes and best practices. This keeps healthcare providers from expending resources for costly (and not to mention, time-consuming) in-house hiring and training to address turnover.
2. Minimizes Claim Denials and Revenue Loss
With a limited billing workforce, mistakes become more frequent, leading to claim denials and delayed reimbursements. When you outsource medical billing teams, they are focused solely on the billing process and work with your existing team remotely. This ensures attention to detail and accuracy, making it so that claims are submitted correctly the first time. This dedicated billing team can also handle previously denied claims — making sure appeals and resubmissions are processed quickly to maximize revenue recovery.
3. Reduces the Burden on Existing Staff
A shrinking workforce often forces remaining medical billers to take on excessive workloads, leading to burnout and decreased accuracy. Outsourcing alleviates this pressure by distributing billing tasks among a team of experienced professionals.
For example, you can have a dedicated medical billing team for processing new claims, another for appeals and re-submissions, and another for auditing and quality assurance. This ensures that claims are processed efficiently without overloading in-house staff, leading to maintained productivity and job satisfaction, and, more importantly, improving patient care.
4. Cost Efficiency
Hiring, training, and retaining in-house billing staff is expensive, especially with rising labor costs and higher qualifications for medical billing positions. Outsourcing medical billing lessens the financial requirement needed to cover salaries, benefits, and ongoing training expenses for remote billers, while still providing high-quality billing services. A fixed rate with a medical billing outsourcing partner can cover salaries, overhead, equipment, and training for your remote team. This cost-effective model allows healthcare providers to allocate resources more efficiently and invest more towards patient satisfaction instead of administrative overhead.
5. Scalability
Fluctuating patient volumes make it difficult to maintain the right number of billing staff year-round. Outsourcing medical billing allows organizations to scale up their billing teams on demand, especially for these times where there is a shortage of staff. This also helps to address seasonal surges, or when expanding into new markets. Outsourced teams provide the flexibility to increase the number of staff when needed.
In Conclusion
As the demand for skilled medical billers continues to rise, outsourcing provides a sustainable, cost effective, and efficient way for healthcare organizations to deal with the shortage in talent for medical billing and maintain smooth revenue cycle operations. By partnering with experienced outsourcing firms, providers can navigate staffing shortages while optimizing their financial health.
Augment your healthcare staff with a remote team of medical billing specialists through FGC+. We empower you with comprehensive healthcare support services and medical billing solutions all-year round. Learn more about our brand of end-to-end outsourcing services at www.fgcplus.com.
