Medical Billing and Coding Training - Work At Home

There's much more to establishing an at-home medical billing or medical coding business than installing the right software on your computer and letting doctors know that you're open for business.

To avoid the heartache of starting a business that loses money, or being taken advantage of by medical coding software scams, here are some important things to remember:

With the health care industry growing rapidly and demands on in-house medical office staff increasing, many doctors are outsourcing billing tasks to independent, work-at-home medical billing and coding professionals. If you're interested in doing medical billing at home, here are some steps you can take to get your business up and running:
 

First of all evaluate your personality. Running a medical billing business at home takes focus, self-discipline and a can-do attitude. During the hours you've set aside for work, you'll need to be able to tune out all the household distractions. You'll also need to be ready to handle all aspects of the business, from the actual work you do for clients to marketing your business, doing the bookkeeping, invoicing your clients and eventually possibly managing employees.

You must get medical billing training. There is a wide variety of medical billing training programs to choose from. Whether you want to earn a certificate or degree, learn online or on campus, you can use check the list of schools to find he school that's best for you.

Try to get hands-on experience. Since it is the medical billers and coders who directly influence when and how much doctors get paid by insurance companies, you are much more likely to win more clients when you have some practical experience under your belt. This being the case, you may want to take a job in a medical office to learn as much as possible for the first six or 12 months of your career.

Make sure to write a business plan. Outline the goals you have for your business and the steps you plan to take to reach them. For example, you might want to land your first client in six months or less of obtaining your business license and have three clients by the end of your first year (you can plan on making an average of about $10,000 per year, per doctor, so says the Electronic Medical Billing Network of America.) Your business plan should specify how you plan to achieve these goals.

Take stock of all your financial resources. You should plan to spend about $3,000 to launch your home-based medical billing business. This will cover the medical billing software you'll need, office supplies, business-licensing fees, and the costs of your initial marketing materials. If your family currently relies on you to contribute to the monthly household income, you'll likely want to have the equivalent of at least six-to-eight months' income in savings—more if you don't plan to work while completing your training. You may also want to budget money for your education if you don't want to take out any student loans.  Grants may be available as are education loans. Make sure you know what you are doing and truly enjoy medical billing before you spend any money on a new business.

Research the local market. Before you start your at-home medical billing business, you'll want to determine if your local market is already saturated with similar operations. According to Electronic Medical Billing Network of America, for every 1,000 doctors in your area, two or three will greatly need your services at any given time. At the same time, about 25 percent of the medical billing practices you see in the “Billing” or “Insurance Claim Specialists” sections of the phone book will be actively looking to add one or two new clients. Making these two calculations should give you a rough idea of supply and demand in your area. Once that is determined and you go ahead. you may want to get a listing in the Yellow Pages for the upcoming year.

Make sure your house is well suited to handling a business. Ideally, you should have a room available to be used exclusively as a home office. You should also check to make sure zoning laws will allow you to operate a home business -this is generally not an issue for those seeking to operate a medical billing business at home, but it may apply to you if you want to hang a sign in front of your house advertising your business or plan to see clients at home or have a lot of traffic to your household.

You'll need to check and register with your state department of revenue and register your business name. The you may need to apply for your business license if your city or town or county requires it. Most cities have websites where you can download all the necessary paperwork to apply for your business license. From there, it's a simple matter of filling out the forms and dropping them in the mail.

Initiate your marketing plan. Once you've completed the above steps, it's time to get to work and start actively seeking clients for your medical billing business. While networking will probably generate the best leads, sending out letters describing your services and following up with phone calls also works well. Your letters can be a part of a first-class mailing to highly targeted clinics  and small medical offices where there may more of a possibility to outsource.

Network, network, network. This will be your best bet. Join local health organizations. You can make industry contacts by joining professional organizations, talking to your own family's doctors, or even by taking a job with a temp agency (specializing in medical staffing) so that you're able to work  with a wide variety of potential clients.