Starting Your Own Medical Billing Business - Part 2

Marketing Your New Business

Next comes the hard part: Marketing...

The hard part is getting your foot past the gatekeepers. This is not easy. They see people every day trying to get their foot in the door and they have seen more pamphlets than you can imagine. They are used to the sweet talk, the free chochkies, cookies and brownies. They have heard the line: "Using me will save your provider money" about 1,000,000 times.

Think of things this way: You are in your home and every 5 minutes your doorbell rings and there is a vacuum salesman there. What will you do after awhile? This is what the doctors office goes through every day. So, you need to find a successful way to tunnel your way past the gatekeepers. Marketing will be the most difficult and possibly expensive task you will get through.

Once you get to the Great Oz

How will you present yourself to show you are worthy of the doctor's business? You may be asked some tough questions and be prepared to have some answers

a) Why should I give you my business?
b) why do you want to work from home?
c) If your intent is to be closer to your children, how much time will you devote to my business and how much time will you devote to your family?
d) What happens if you have an emergency with your child?
e) How will you conduct business after a natural disaster?
f) How secure is my information?
g) How do you plan on getting the data sent to you?
h) Once you receive the data, what is the turn around time to sending a claim?
i) How far do you take a claim?
j) How many appeals have you filed and what is your success rate?
k) Do you have a compliance plan?
l) How do you handle attorney requests or subpoenas.
m) Tell me what you do with patient complaints.
n) Will you charge me a start up fee. If so, how much, and why?
o) What services can you offer me?
p) How much are your fees?
q) Do you have a proposal available to review?
r) Why should I use you versus hiring someone in house or another company?
s) What will you do if you decide to take a vacation?
t) What is your plan in the event of a natural disaster?
u) What precautions have you taken to secure my patient information?

We Want you to be Successful in Your Medical Coding Career!

As With So Many Things In Life:
Success Isn't Always Guaranteed

Most businesses or companies FAIL within their first 5 years of doing business. I speak from personal experience with other businesses I tried when I was younger. Just to give you an idea, my friend and I formed a corporation per State Law. Our objective was to provide seminars on medical coding and billing back in the early 1990s.

He was an office manager and I was already a biller with extensive training and experience as an instructor. We prepared to give a free seminar at the time. We sent out 50,000 fliers, rented a nice hotel conference room, came up with free gifts for give aways and we offered to provide free appeals to their claims denials. We received no response to our marketing materials which was done by a professional company. No one showed at the seminar.

-- Steve Verno, Certified Biller

About the Author: Steve is a Certified Master Medical Coder and Certified Master Medical Biller and Medical Coding/Billing Instructor. He also is the co-owner of Lucrum Consulting, LLC, which provides training in medical coding and billing issues, and helps physician's practices in areas such as A/R recovery, appeals, and staff training.