starting a new home based medical billing business

by Laura
(FL)

Me and my husband are masters in biochemistry, I was in pharmaceutical research, he work in hospital and have a vast experience in health and life insurance. We have no experience in medical billing. He is MBA also. Both have a accounting and book keeping experience. Excellent hand on computers also. We want to start a home based medical billing business, is that a wise idea? What should we do to get started?

Response:
Given you and your husbands education and experience I think you would certainly have and advantage over others starting a business in this field.

I will be honest and say that a billing business can be very competitive and challenging to get into. Like a lot of new businesses it can take a while to be profitable. For small billers there is a niche in serving individual providers. Larger practices with several providers can be a challenge as many are affiliated with hospitals or large organizations that have their own centralized billing.

Probably the biggest challenges are learning insurance reimbursement and coding and then marketing to get that first client. If you haven't done any billing before I would suggest training in billing and coding before attempting to "learn on the job" with a client as that can be a disaster. There are several good online courses available for a reasonable cost. For example the American Association of Professional Coders (AAPC) has a medical billing course for under a $1000. (www.aapc.com) It's also important to keep up to date on current issues that affect billing such as ICD-10, HIPAA, Meaningful Use, Medicare changes, etc.

I think you and your husband would have an advantage with your credentials. If you do decide to pursue billing I would suggest you emphasize all your education and experience when marketing your service.

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