Premiere Pediatrics of Beverly Hills found themselves in transition to a new practice management system and short handed in their billing department.

They preferred to keep billing in house but needed to keep the billing current and move through the new system learning curve as quickly as possible. PedsOne assigned one of our billing specialists to work directly with the PPBH staff and in 5 weeks time, they were soaring on their own.

An account of their go live and transition experience was posted on SOAPM by Dr. Michael Sachs:

While this is going to be a PCC-centric answer, it can be generalized to any office – and not only those who have gone live with a new system recently.

We received the usual awesome PCC implementation. The person who came to our office for the Partner (PMS) implementation has been with the company over twenty years and helped write some of the code, so she knows pretty much everything the system is capable of doing and how to train an office properly. But our billers found themselves getting behind because we hadn’t anticipated how much time they’d still need to spend on our previous practice management systems, and before long the A/R was starting to rise and it became apparent we’d need additional billing help to catch up.

In addition to hiring another full-time biller, we entered into a temporary consultation arrangement with PedsOne, a billing company that at this point only works with PCC clients. Rather than switch all our billing to this service, they made one of their billers available to us on an hourly basis for several weeks. What we wound up receiving was not only the work this biller did tracing outstanding claims, but our billers received a billing tutorial from an expert biller who used the system in a different way than the PCC training staff.

It was like the difference between getting flying lessons from the engineer who designed the plane and the mechanic who maintains it vs. the pilot who’s behind the controls. They all have their own area of expertise and the cost of receiving the “pilot’s” training was worth far more than just the traced claims – the knowledge will serve our office well forever. Even if we hadn’t needed help tracing unpaid claims, knowing what I know now I still would have wanted our billers to get this additional consultation early after our go-live.

So, if any office using any PMS feels their billing staff could use a tune-up, consider contacting your vendor and ask if there’s a billing service that either works exclusively with their company or has exceptional expertise with their PMS. Or post a message to the SOAPM list or that company’s listserve asking if any offices use a billing service they’re thrilled with that seems particularly knowledgeable with that product. Even if you’ll keep your billing in-house, if the billing service will agree to an hourly consultation rate the ROI can be well worth it.

Michael Sachs, M.D.