Many practices hesitate to outsource billing because they see it as an added expense. In reality, keeping billing in-house is often far more expensive and less efficient than outsourcing to a professional RCM partner.
Real Cost Comparison: In-House vs Outsourced
Consider a medium-sized mental health practice with five providers seeing 100 to 120 patients per week. Their in-house billing setup included one full-time coder, one full-time biller, and front desk staff handling billing-related tasks. Salaries alone for the billing team totaled around $4500 per month, with an additional $1500 for front desk administrative work and about $500 for software licenses and updates, bringing the total in-house billing costs to roughly $6500 per month.
By contrast, outsourcing their full-service billing covering coding, submission, follow-up, and denial management cost them only $2500 per month. That is a monthly savings of $4000, or over 60 percent, without reducing the quality of work or delaying payments.
We worked with a mental health clinic in Texas that had been managing billing in-house for over 4 years.
Before Outsourcing to Codeify Me:
- In-house cost is $6500/month (staff salaries, software, and overhead)
- Collection rate is only75%
- AR days 55
After Outsourcing to Codeify Me:
- Combined package cost: $2500/month
- Collection rate improved to 92 percent
- AR days reduced to 30
- Staff freed to focus on patient care and therapy sessions
- The clinic not only cut costs by $4000 per month, but they also increased revenue by 20–25 percent purely from more accurate billing, faster claims processing, and denial management.
Additional Advantages of Outsourcing
- Reduced Operational Burden so Front desk, billing, and coding staff can focus on patient care
- No more managing payroll, benefits, or billing software
- Access to Expertise and Technology using advanced claim scrubbers and reporting dashboards
- Have enough time to keep Up-to-date with payer rules and CMS regulations
- Scalability can be achieved as patient volume grows, the outsourcing partner scales operations without additional staffing costs
Conclusion
Outsourcing billing is not an expense it is a strategic investment. Mental health practices, in particular, often see the fastest ROI because they have smaller staff handling large claim volumes so reduce costs by 50 to 60 percent, increase collection rates and cash flow and free your staff to focus on patient care.
At Codeifyme, we provide full-service outsourced billing for mental health and specialty practices.
Cut your billing costs by more than half
