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Business Solutions
“Being able to work with a billing company that can tweak their staff to follow unique processes is an ongoing effort that requires patience and work.”
situation.
“That’s what we’ve done with three or
four different processes with Prochant,” he explains. “And they’ve been flexible and worked with us.”
To that end, Lehan says that providers considering outsourcing their billing need to look at the outsourcer as an employee. In Lehan’s case, his company works with Prochant and sees the company as part of its org chart. It manages and communi- cates with Prochant the way it would any member of its business.
Ultimately, if providers take a staged approach, think carefully about the billing workflows they want to outsource, and consider their billing partner a part of the process, the outsourcing relationship will become like second nature, Lehan says.
“I’m sure every provider does things a little bit differently, and being able to work with a billing company that can tweak their staff to follow unique processes is an ongoing effort that requires patience and work,” he explains. “And then, when you get to the point that it’s running smoothly, you think, ‘How can we ever go back?’”
revenue growth a year,” he says. “Even if you start with a small number, when you keep repeating that and get to a larger size, our growth was outpacing our ability to keep up with hiring, training, staffing on the billing side of things.”
Lehan says his company had tried to outsource its billing before but had made the mistake of outsourcing as much of the revenue cycle as possible, from order confirmation to the end of the revenue cycle. The experiment did not work out.
“That showed us that we were naive in thinking, ‘Hey, we kind of just wash our hands of billing and the outsourcer does it all, so that we can focus on the other parts of the business,” he says.
So, Lehan Drugs reapproached outsourcing its billing with a staged approach.
— Jim Lehan, Lehan Drugs Inc.
“Instead of the whole ball of wax, we started out with outsourcing one piece of billing, improved the process, and make sure it’s going well,” Lehan explains. “Then we said, ‘Okay, what else can we add? Are there things that aren’t our wheelhouse, that aren’t our area of expertise?’ And that’s certainly the A/R portion of billing for us.”
From there, a provider can look at other processes in the revenue cycle that can
be outsourced. Leehan notes that for his business, those processes seem to be the steps that are complicated and insulated from front-facing relationships. If there are repeatable processes with variable deci- sions attached to them (“if this, then that”) that are not diectly engaging patient or a provider relationship, then those are the types of workflows that Lehan documents and aims to transition to an outsourcing
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