If you are a struggling new business I’m sure you wish your problem was that you were growing too large. But the reality is that when you are a growing business it can be difficult to see when you are growing too quickly.
For either the medical office or the medical billing service the same thing applies. When you grow too fast you risk not being able to take care of your customers the best possible way. We found an interesting example of this today.
We signed up a new account today. It was a small account, but his billing was important to him. He had signed up with a billing service in April 2007 and now in January 2008 had not yet received $.01 from an insurance company.
He inquired regularly to his service as to the status of his claims and was assured that everything was in place. Now nine months later he is questioning if he can stay in business.
How can you let nine months go by without a payment and not do something? That can only happen if you grow too quickly and can’t take care of the details of your business. The details are critical.
Patients who must wait hours in a waiting room for the doctor are not happy patients. If this is happening 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 comp checks, this paperwork needs to be completed asap. It is very important to this patient. These are the details I’m talking about.
If you already have too many patients to take care of the ones you have effectively, it is time to stop taking on new patients. If you don’t, you will find you are losing old patients as fast as you are gaining new ones.
This is also true of medical billing businesses. You must do a good job with the accounts you have. The details are critical. If you are too busy posting the payments to work your aging reports, you aren’t paying attention to the details.
It’s important to remember that whether it is a medical office or a billing service, it’s still a business and needs to show a profit. So if you get too busy to take care of the details, you’ve grown too fast.
Copyright 2008 – Alice Scott