I received an email not too long ago from a medical billing company who talks about the crazy costs associated with medical billing. In their email they offered the following statistics on the costs of medical billing.

The statistics below represent industry averages taken from the MGMA.

Claims Rejected on 1st Submission – 30 %
Underpayed Claims – 20%
Gross Collection Rate – < 60%
Preventable Denials - 90%
Denials that are Recoverable - 67%
Average days in A/R - 52.32
Cost per claim - $5-$7
Cost per FTE physician - $30,000-$60,000
Cost of billing operations - 18-22%
Cost of Billing Personnel - 58-62%
Cost of Technology/ Practice Management Solution - 18-22%

Source: Avisena whitepaper

I must admit that billing is far from my expertise, but it’s a well described necessary evil for almost any practice. Plus, the better you do it, the more money your clinical practice can make.

Of course, my question is how did implementing an EMR in your clinic either help or hurt these various costs? Were you better able to process claims, because the charting was done electronically and the coding done at the time of visit? Were you able to process claims at a higher rate because your documentation was more complete using an EMR? Could you more quickly process denied claims because it was electronic? Did you need more or less employees to do your billing after implementing an EMR?

I guess it would also be important to know if you decided to go with an integrated Electronic Medical Record and Practice Management System or if you tried an interface between your legacy system and a new EMR system.