One of the main goals of school districts, boards, and administrators is to make more money for their college or university, in addition to ensuring the safety, well-being, and education of their students. If you’re not streamlining your billing processes through outsourced student health billing services, you could be leaving money on the table that could go right back into your business. Students need health services. That’s a given. They are away from home, often for the first time, they have their own insurance or are still under their parents’ insurance. When they visit the school nurse for care, whether a routine appointment or sick visit, there must be some sort of seamless process in place that can ensure high collection rates.
With student health billing services, schools can bring in more money overall. To achieve that, they need a medical billing service behind them driving this effort.
Benefits of Student Health Billing
Many schools’ student health services departments use a fee-for-service billing model, just like students would find at their primary care physician’s office back home. Anything from office visits and lab services to x-rays and pharmacy meds is billed to the insurance carrier, while basic services such as first aid, consultations, advice from nurses, and nutrition counseling are typically offered free of charge. There are many benefits to improving your bottom line with student health billing services, including:
- More control: With an outsourced company handling all the time-consuming work and headaches associated with student health billing, you can concentrate on more important aspects of your department, mainly the quality of patient care. Such a service can make quick monthly and annual comparisons, while factors such as charge entry errors or payer reimbursement issues can be identified quickly before becoming a far-reaching problem. With such a team approach to achieving goals, less time is spent by your regular staff on tedious billing and clerical tasks.
- Consistency: If you are billing in-house, you’re risking revenue interruptions when changes happen to your staff or someone calls in sick. Outsourcing your medical billing puts an entire team at your disposal who ensure claims get processed quickly and accurately. As a result, there’s less risk of cash flow disruptions. An outsourced medical billing service can also coordinate with your front-office staff to ensure co-payments are collected consistently from students, who are notoriously low on cash.
- Insider Knowledge: A medical billing service has a vast knowledge base from which to draw on, as they work with many other schools and practice networks to bring you leading-edge experience in real time for faster turnarounds.
- Faster payments: The goal of any medical billing service is to bring in cash — quick. Time spent in revenue cycle time can make a huge difference on your cash flow situation. Outsourced medical billers can submit claims faster, with fewer mistakes, quicker payment turnarounds, and the highest reimbursement possible.
Medical Healthcare Solutions is your trusted partner in facilitating quick, consistent, effective student health billing services that improve the bottom line for your college or university. Call us today at 800-762-9800 to learn more.