Anesthesia Practices and Billing Services, why breaking up is so hard to do

An anesthesia group with 19 providers recently decided to end its relationship with its east coast billing service and bring the billing in-house. The anesthesia group had 5 years worth of data returned as a box full of paper reports and disconnected data files and spreadsheets.

This is a pretty typical scenario since there is no standard for exchanging billing data between Practice Management Systems (PMS). This problem exists for just about any practice that uses any billing service. The time and expense of trying to recreate records can be substantial and a disruption to cash flow is inevitable.

Recognizing these facts can cause a practice to stay tied to a poorly performing billing service where their only choice is to stay with the billing service and lose money slowly or face the certain disruption and expense a break may incur.

There is a solution and it can be almost cost free.

The solution is for the practice to subscribe to their own anesthesia practice management software. If the practice outsources their billing they can then ask the 3rd party billing service to log into the practice's software to do the billing. If the practice wanted to end the relationship with the billing service they could take over billing or assign it to another billing service almost immediately with no loss of data or additional cost.

This article focuses on the benefits of using UbiquityMD (UBMD) anesthesia practice management software system, to fulfill this role.

Eight ways a practice benefits by having its own subscription to UbiquityMD, even if it outsources billing.

1) Full Control. The data and software are yours. If you end the billing service relationship, all the data and software remains under your control, with no loss, no additional expense and no interruption in business operations or cash flow. At any time you are free to switch to another billing service or to take over billing in-house.

2) More Flexibility. With a subscription to UbiquityMD your office could handle 100% of the billing in-house or you could have a billing service log into your software and they could take care of 100% of the billing. Or you could have a mixed arrangement where your office staff could, for example, enter in patient demographics and you could hire a billing service to log in and take care of everything else.

3) Greater Access. UbiquityMD is available 24x7 from anywhere. If you need information about a patient at midnight, you don't need to wait until the billing office is open, you can log in and get it. If you want to run reports from home, you can do it.

4) Access Control. With your ability to assign limited access rights in UbiquityMD, you could allow your accountant to log in with the limited ability to run reports, or each individual provider to log in to view just their own patient information.

5) Accountability and Reporting. Because the practice can log into its data at any time, it can maintain close tabs on the real time status of its accounts using its real time drill down charts or UBMD's flexible reports to quickly assess the overall status of your accounts or the specific details of any single case. A billing service might be more alert to problems if it knows the customer is watching.

6) Cost Free. It would be reasonable to expect the billing service to deduct or assume the ongoing monthly cost of the software subscription as a part of its standard fee.

7) Ensure Security and Compliance. UbiquityMD is the only anesthesia billing software that stores all confidential data as encrypted data. If your data is being stored in any other software, the practice runs the risk of a data breech that could be very costly and damaging to the reputation of the practice. UBMD has been cited as one of the most secure and compliant PMS systems of any by a leading security expert.

8) Ensure Maximum Collections. UBMD is unrivaled in its automated features, validations and overall ability to maximize collections. For the same charges, most billing services will increase the amount and speed of collections if they use UBMD. By having your billing service use UBMD, you can be sure you are receiving the maximum for your efforts.

UbiquityMD was created by Navaro Medical Solutions, Inc. (Navaro) a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that has specialized in the design and support of anesthesia billing software for over 18 years with customers from Hawaii to Georgia. Navaro's customers include about 50% anesthesia practices and 50% billing services that specialize in anesthesia billing. Navaro offers limited anesthesia and pain management billing services available to its software customers on an hourly basis, suitable for small practices or temporary assistance. Navaro can also refer an anesthesia practice to a quality 3rd party anesthesia billing service that has experience billing with UbiquityMD or we can train your existing in-house or 3rd party billing staff after you subscribe.

In the example cited in this article, the practice had chosen UbiquityMD (UBMD) as their new anesthesia practice management system. UBMD has developed proprietary tools for importing data from other practice management systems by importing the 837 files, which most additional PMS systems can create. It also wrote a custom import program to read data from an excel spreadsheet exported by the other software, so the anesthesia practice was able to restore a large part of the information.

UbiquityMD is built from the ground up with the very latest software technology and continues to grow and evolve with the changing industry. UbiquityMD is the only practice management system in the industry to be ‘Certified for Windows Vista' by Microsoft and compatible with the new Windows 7. It is just as suitable for a solo provider as it is for a group of 100 providers. While the software has an abundance of features relating to anesthesia and pain management billing, it can also be used to bill any professional claim for any specialty.

For more information about UbiquityMD visit our website at www.ubiquitymd.com, or email sales at sales@ubiquitymd.com or call at 859-586-0300.