05/21/2018    Matthew B. Richins, DPM

Billing Company Negligence

I had this exact same problem with my billing
company. They are happy to bill all your clean
claims, but are reluctant to work on denied
claims or go after secondary insurers. Think
about it. If you got paid the same to debride
nails as you did to do a bunionectomy, would the
business side of your brain ever want you to step
into the OR again? Why would they want (and why
would you expect them) to work harder for less
money? Once I realized this, I hired a biller and
did it all in-house.

After I hired my biller, her first month on the
job was to learn the ropes and to figure out how
to bill podiatry. I told my billing company that
I wanted more clean claims and had an employee
who would be double checking my billing and
adding appropriate modifiers. Ironically, they
loved it, as it was less work for them. After she
got the hang of things. I advised the billing
company that I would not be sending them any more
billing, nor paying them any more money until the
AR (which was over $100K) was significantly
reduced.

At first, they were willing to work for it, but
reduced the AR very little, because they simply
are not trained to work claims. After several
weeks, they caught on and sent me threats of
lawsuits for failure to pay and breach of
contract, which I ignored. I was confident that
if they sued, I would win the counter suit as the
sum they failed to work was much higher then what
I owed. It has been 8 years, no lawsuit was
filed, my collections are great and my 30-90+ day
AR never gets over $25K. The moral: no one will
go after your money better than you.

Matthew B. Richins, DPM, Joplin, MO

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