I get round to it when I have the time
What a truly awful expression! It was said to me recently by a medical secretary who was struggling to get all her invoicing done. Her belief was that she had only many hours in the day and it was...
Are you actually getting paid? Show me the money then!
Anybody ever watched the movie “Jerry Maguire” and the immortal quote – show me the money! Clearly a guy I recently bumped into at a medical conference hadn’t. He was the Practice Manager for a...
Swallow Your Pride And Ask For Help
It takes an amazing amount of determination and resilience to become a consultant surgeon. Years of study, sacrifice and long, long nights. Finally you make it. Then one day decide to start a...
Why do I love mistakes?
I love it when a mistake happens or when something goes wrong. It means I get the chance to look at what went wrong and more importantly WHY it went wrong. That means I can stop the same mistake...
The Patient Paid Cash On The Way Out
It’s great when a patient pays cash - on the way out he or she produces a roll of £10 notes and pays in full. It happened just before Christmas last year to an MHM client. Couple of items to...
Have your phone answered quickly and politely
One of my major bugbears with medical practice is the ability to answer the phone. Sounds simple. It is! Yet many practices do not answer the phone. Instead, the call goes to an answering machine...
Procrastination used the right way
I called one of my friends early one evening recently. His phone went straight to voice mail. Curiously he didn't call me back with half an hour or so per normal. He called me this morning...
Outsourcing does not mean a lack of communication
MHM sort of cheats when we say we are an outsourced medical biller. We don't share premises with our consultant surgeons nor are we next door to the hospital. Neither do we speak to them every...
I’ll leave that until later. No wonder he wasn’t getting paid.
There a few things I hear that automatically set alarm bells ringing when I look at the invoicing and billing process of a business. "I'll take a look at it next week" "I'll get round to it in a...
Yes! You can ask to get paid more!
This is the one question I get asked more often than all the others. The first thing to realise about increasing a fee is that you CANNOT increase a fee for all your surgical episodes. Nor...
Find Out What is causing the problem. Don’t just guess
A group of surgeons I know is having problems getting paid by insurance companies. Not just an individual insurance company but all insurance companies. More specifically or so the surgeon's...
Medical Billing should take more time and not less.
I'm a really, really impatient person. I like everything done yesterday. Which is why I go incredibly slowly to start with. Do it once and do it right When I begin to raise invoices for a consultant...