Can your doctor’s office or medical billing business get too big?

If you’re a struggling new business, I’m sure you wish your problem was that you were growing too big. But the reality is that when it comes to a growing business, it can be hard to see when it’s growing too fast.

The same applies to both the doctor’s office and the medical billing service. When you grow too fast, you risk not being able to serve your customers in the best possible way. We found an interesting example of this today.

We registered a new account today. It was a small account, but his billing was important to him. She had signed up for a billing service in April 2007 and now, in January 2008, she had yet to receive $.01 from an insurance company.

He regularly inquired with his service about the status of his claims and was assured that everything was in place. Now, nine months later, she wonders if she can stay in business.

How can you let nine months go by without paying and doing nothing? That can only happen if you grow too fast and can’t take care of the details of your business. Details are critical.

Patients who must wait hours in a waiting room for the doctor are not happy patients. If this happens in your office, you need to make changes and make them quickly before your practice suffers.

If paperwork is required for patients to receive their workers’ compensation checks, this paperwork must be completed as soon as possible. It is very important for this patient. These are the details I’m talking about.

If you already have too many patients to serve your current ones effectively, it’s time to stop accepting new patients. If you don’t, you’ll find that you’re losing old patients as fast as you’re gaining new ones.

This also applies to medical billing companies. You must do a good job with the accounts you have. Details are critical. If you’re too busy recording payments to work on your aging reports, you’re not paying attention to detail.

It’s important to remember that whether it’s a medical office or a billing service, it’s still a business and needs to be profitable. So if you’re too busy to deal with the details, you’ve grown too fast.

Copyright 2008 – Alice Scott