Outsource Medical Coding and Save Your Practice Money

You are in business to save lives, but your medical practice is still a business. You must save operating capital where you can, and one area where you can cut internal costs is your medical coding. You need coding and billing to generate income, and if you outsource medical coding, you’ll see more of that income go toward building your practice than toward operations. Here are four ways outsourcing medical coding saves your health care facility money.

Employee Salary

According to the Bureau of Labor Standards Enforcement, medical coding is growing quickly because the health care industry is growing quickly. By 2024, it is estimated that the demand for health care administrators, including coders, will grow by 15 percent. As job demand increases so does salary demand. Currently, the average median hourly rate for a medical coder is over $18 per hour. That’s over $720 per week out of your operating capital.

Employee Benefits

Alongside paying salary, you must also offer a competitive benefits package to your medical coders if you want to attract the best talent in the business. Simply put, the faster and more accurate your medical coders are, the more money comes into your facility. When you take into account the costs of dental, life, medical and vision insurance alongside providing a retirement plan and paid vacation and holidays, you’ve just added a lot more money to that $720 per week.

Employment Taxes

When you outsource medical coding, you save yourself employment taxes, too. A professional company that offers this service hires employees to work for them or independent contractors. This means they or the coders are responsible for paying all employment taxes, which looks good on your bottom line each month. If you are operating in a state with employment taxes as well, you save money at the both the state and federal level each tax time.

Worker’s Compensation Insurance

Most states require businesses to carry worker’s compensation insurance coverage for all employees, and this will include your medical coders. In some cases, the worker’s compensation for a health care facility can be even more expensive, because your personnel are exposed to dangers every day. Airborne pathogens, bacteria, fungi and viruses are common issues in a medical facility, so your worker’s compensation bill is probably already quite high.

When you outsource your medical coding operations to a professional company, you decrease the number of employees you have working at your facility. Some states only require a business carry worker’s compensation insurance if they employee more than a set minimum number of people. If you can get your personnel below that number, you might not have to carry full worker’s compensation coverage at all, which will reduce your business insurance policy premiums.

As you can see, when you outsource medical coding to a professional company, you not only get the expertise of some of the best coders in the world who are ready, willing and able to work within your billing system, you also save operating costs. With that savings, you can purchase the latest equipment to improve your health care facility patient treatment.

Weston Barnes is a write and an avid reader. When he's not writing about business, marketing, health, pets, or relationships, he's immersed in his latest book.