Founders Blog: Shortage of Doctors GOOD for Medical Billing?
UPDATE 6/2/16: Check out this PDF with 10 quotes from doctors on the current “burnout” situation. (From http://www.physicianspractice.com)
Hello, I’m Patrick Phillips. I’m the Founder and CEO of American Business Systems. In this video, I want to share with you why a shortage of doctors is good news for the medical billing industry. I mean, this is the business that my company trains and supports people in, right? Billing for doctors. You see, our business is intricately tied to helping people learn how to do that through our live training workshop. So the question is, how can a doctor shortage be good news for the medical billing industry?
Well first, take a look at this quote from an article that was just published by FiercePracticeManagement. A new report from the Association of American Medical Colleges projects a continued gap over the next decade. With the supply of both primary and non-primary physicians expected to be outstripped by increased demand. Projections show a nationwide shortage of between 61,700 and 94,700 physicians by 2025. They go on to say overall population growth and the aging of the baby boomers will be the predominant cause of increased demand. While the increase in demand from newly insured individuals under the Affordable Care Act, that’s Obamacare by the way, suggests that the physician shortage is actually larger than it looks.
Now here’s why this is helping the medical billing industry. It’s simple. With fewer doctors to see all these baby boomers and Obamacare enrollees, the medical practices are going to be swamped. That’s right. All doctors are going to have to see that many more patients in their practice. This means that they and their staff are going to have to focus on their core competency, of course, which is seeing patients and helping people get well.
So here’s what this means for you. If you’re interested in getting into medical billing, learning how to start your own medical revenue management business, with our help of course, the doctors out there in your community will be forced to outsource anything in their office that doesn’t pertain to helping patients.
Think about it. The doctor has to bill someone to pay his staff and his overhead at the office and so forth and stay in practice. But that can be done by someone who’s been trained to do that billing. Someone who does it not just for one doctor but for a number of practices. An expert like you, that is, once you’ve gone through our training. You see, this is how this will help the doctor and his staff to stay focused on helping patients and not get bogged down in the minutia of billing the insurance companies and the government agencies and their patients.
And by the way, this can be done much more efficiently and inexpensively than the doctor paying his or her own staff to do it. Besides there’s all sorts of hidden costs to doing the billing in-house for a doctor. Things like hardware and software updates, user fees, online access fees, technical support, training, checking eligibility, follow up with the insurance companies. It goes on and on and on.
All of these things take away from the bottom line of a medical practice and adds to the headaches that the office manager and the doctor has to deal with every day. By the way this is why our business is booming right now. Our graduates from our training are signing up more doctors every month than in our entire 22-year history. Maybe it’s time you looked in to starting your own profitable medical billing business and becoming certified as a medical revenue manager through American Business Systems. Check us out.