If you’re thinking of becoming a medical biller for a medical billing company, there are some things that you might want to know about some common problems before you decide to take the job. This is a very stressful career choice and if you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into, you could end up regretting it for the rest of your life. What follows are just some of the common problems and there are a lot more.
One of the biggest problems you’re going to run into as a medical biller is patient complaints. You have to understand something. These people are usually very poor and need to have their medical bills paid by the carrier. When things don’t go right and they’re not reimbursed for their prescription or whatever right away, the first thing they are going to do is call you and complain. And this goes on all day in addition to your regular billing duties of trying to get the bills out.
Medical Billing
And what about those duties, when you actually get the chance to do them? The medical billing software that is absolutely perfect and problem free hasn’t been invented yet. You are going to run into problems with corrupted data, programs that don’t work, modems that stop functioning when trying to submit a claim electronically, down phone lines and a number of other technical problems. Your computer will become your worst enemy at the worst time.
And what about dealing with the insurance carriers? This is probably the worst part of the whole job because unless you’re dealing with private insurance, where they have to care about their customers or they lose them, you’re dealing with government agencies who just don’t care. So if you have a disputed claim and what to get it paid fast, you’ve got a long wait until that claim is adjudicated. Sometimes it can be months before it is settled. This makes for a very unhappy patient, which in turn makes for a very unhappy worker when those calls start coming in.
And then there is all the legal red tape. The medical billing industry in the United States is one of the most regulated. You can’t turn around without running into some kind of regulation that hinders the work that you do. Keeping track of all the different forms that go along with these regulations is a nightmare. Better have a checklist near your desk of all the forms and when you’ll need them because there is no way to keep all that stuff in your head.
And if all that isn’t enough, you have to deal with the company you work for. They are in the business of medical billing to make money and that means doing your job quickly. It’s now how good you do it but how fast. In other words, quantity of quality. It’s the number of claims you process, period. This is a very stressful way to work, especially when you have so many outside factors slowing you up.
So if you’re thinking about getting into the medical billing field, you might want to reflect on some of these problems first.
