As a student care provider, you no doubt want to center your efforts on the quality of care that your students are receiving. Whether you manage a boarding high school, a small college or a university, you are likely experiencing some difficulties in terms of billing, particularly if you’re trying to handle it all in-house. This taxes your existing staff, increases chances for costly mistakes, and can be detrimental to your bottom line as accounts receivables are not enforced like they should be.
Your students need quality care, that’s a given. It’s also a fact that they have to be billed for those services. Generally, health care services are not covered under tuition costs. This is a precarious situation because many students are still included on their parents’ health plan. But what works in terms of billing for the parents may not necessarily work well on the student end. Students, especially young ones who may only be 14 starting out their first year at a boarding school, need extra TLC. They are in a new environment, they have questions that Mom or Dad can’t answer and they need help. That’s where you come in.
As such, it’s important that you streamline your medical billing efforts to bring an increased focus to student care.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 20 million students were enrolled at American colleges and universities in 2015, an increase of nearly five million since 2000. All of those students require quality care.
How Third Party Billing Helps
When it comes to student health billing, consider a third party provider to handle all this. You may currently divide billing among your staff, or perhaps you have an in-house employee that takes care of this. Either way, you could be losing money. Not only that, you could be devoting so much time on billing tasks and chasing down payments that you are failing in your most integral role: caregiver.
So, why should you outsource to a billing service? The main reason is to establish a new revenue stream through the reduction of self-pay billable line items. Those streams that you may have believed uncollectible now have the ability to be recouped, presenting a whole new possibility for revenue and growth potential. This is a good thing, especially in an economic climate where the recovery rate for non-hospitals is 21 percent for healthcare debt and collections, says ACA International.
Medical billing is demanding, draining, time-consuming and challenging. Taxing your staff with these challenges absolutely takes away time and resources better spent with your young patients. In addition to increased focus on student care, you can experience these benefits from hiring a third party biller:
- Reduce billing errors
- Save thousands of dollars annually on salaries and benefits, office supplies, furniture, billing software maintenance and computer equipment
- Reduce billing interruptions due to employee absence
- Improve patient satisfaction
- Ensure billing compliance
- Increase revenue
Sound like an asset to your school? Contact Medical Healthcare Solutions to learn how to make this a reality.