Ten questions to ask your billing company.
Answer each one honestly and watch the score. It takes two minutes, needs no email, and tells you whether your billing company is watching your money or just sending claims.
Do you get a written monthly report with charges, payments, adjustments, denial rate and days in AR?
Without the four core numbers you cannot see a problem early.
Can you name your first-pass denial rate for last month?
A well-run practice sees under 10 percent. If nobody can tell you, nobody is watching.
What happens to a denied claim?
Most lost money is denials nobody appealed within the payer deadline.
How quickly are your claims sent after the visit?
Every day between the visit and the claim is a day you wait to be paid.
Do they check that payers paid your contracted rate?
Underpayments hide inside "paid" claims and are rarely found by accident.
Who owns your data and your practice management system logins?
If the billing company owns the system, leaving them means losing your history.
Is there a signed business associate agreement (BAA) and a clear security program?
A billing company handles protected health information every day.
How are fees calculated?
Percentage of collections aligns interests; percentage of charges or hidden add-ons do not.
When you have a question, who answers and how fast?
A named person who knows your practice beats a ticket queue.
Do they audit coding and tell you what to fix?
Coding feedback protects you from audits and from undercoding.
How we score this
- Each question scores 0, 1 or 2. Zero means you cannot see or control that part of your revenue; two means it is handled and reported.
- The ten questions cover the same ground a revenue cycle audit covers: reporting, denials, claim speed, underpayments, data ownership, compliance, fees, service and coding.
- The verdict is a starting point, not a judgment. A low score usually means nobody asked these questions before, not that your billing company is dishonest. Ask them; a good one will welcome it.
- Nothing is stored. Your answers stay in your browser. Download the PDF if you want to keep them.
Scored under 15? Let us look at one month of your denials.
The free denial autopsy shows what your current billing company left on the table, in numbers you can take into your next meeting with them.