Imaging Billing Services

imaging billingThe ClaimCare Medical Billing Company has significant experience and expertise in imaging billing that can generate a major increase in collections for your Independent Diagnostic Testing Facility (IDTF). Medical billers and medical billing services are the financial backbone of an IDTF. Imaging centers that do not have the right medical billing expertise in their corner can easily lose more than 20 percent of their facility's potential revenue.

Outsourcing medical billing is growing in popularity as a method for addressing this remarkable loss of practice income. The range of outsourcing options runs from exceedingly large organizations to individual freelancers working from home to provide medical billing services.

Although the complexity of basic medical billing is quite high, it pales in comparison to the complications that come to play for imaging billing. Successful navigation of the payers' policies and procedures for paying imaging claims requires specialized knowledge that comes from experience with billing for IDTFs/imaging centers.

The choice of an experience medical billing company has become all the more important for IDTFs as they watch their cost rocket upwards and their allowables spiral downward. With their margins shrinking they must be confident that their medical billing service is collecting every dollar the imaging center is owed.  Selecting the proper medical billing service is made all the more difficult by the fact that many medical billing companies claiming to be experts in billing for imaging centers actually do not do the billing themselves, but outsource the work to other vendors that are based in India or work from their homes.

Deep familiarity and comfort with imaging tests and terminology does not come from serving one or two facilities. Imaging billing success requires both broad and deep expertise in order to collect all of the money owed the facility and successfully appeal claims which have been denied or answer questions the payers may have about a claim.

Good imaging billing requires the ability to track underpayments. This is more complicated than typical medical billing because of the same day scans on contiguous body part rules around multiple tests (especially for Medicare). This complication often exceeds the capabilities of the billing software used by many billing companies. This is a critical failing since proper pursuit of underpayments can increase an imaging center's collections by 7 to 10 percent.

It is not only insurance billing that is more complicated for imaging centers; patient billing is also more difficult. The patients often have high balances, complicated explanations from their payers and do not understand all of the invoices they are receiving from the imaging center. A billing company that has strong imaging billing experience has spoken with patient about such statements many times before. A less skilled patient collection effort could leave the imaging center with less money and unhappy patients (which leads to unhappy referral sources).

New imaging centers which must survive through an out-of-network period are faced with particularly steep imaging billing challenges. They need a imaging billing company that knows how to bill and negotiate out-of-network claims and can help the center deal with the fact that many of their checks will be sent directly to the patients instead of the center.

To avoid all these billing related pitfalls imaging centers need to utilize medical billing companies like ClaimCare that have deep experience with imaging billing.

To learn more about how ClaimCare Medical Billing Services can help your imaging center please fill out the form to the left or contact a local ClaimCare office.