Why Automated Customer Billing is Essential for Medical Labs

Breaking away from tradition is never painless, particularly when something is unknown. But for Medical laboratories that want to scale their firms, decrease accounting errors, and enhance the bottom line, the old way of doing things just doesn’t cut it anymore. Growing client demands, varying policies, and the constant movement toward digitization make operational modification a critical outcome rather than an alternative for most labs. Paramount to these changes is a lab’s customer billing procedures.

If manual procedures still drive your lab’s customer billing functions, you are doing your customers and business a tremendous disservice. You are subjecting your lab to unavoidable accounting errors and delaying your lab’s growth by leaving earnings on the table due to leakage and manual procedures that squander time and resources. With labs across the nation being short-staffed and overworked, forward-thinking lab directors understand the value of efficiency in their operations. The whole health delivery ecosystem counts on it.

The Increasing Need to Automate Billing Procedures

Labs that handle client billing can not afford to use primarily manual processes. Labs are often overloaded with demanding administrative tasks. Tiered payments, volume discounts, complex reimbursement structures, and excessive workloads make things cumbersome for many of the labs.

For labs struggling to address this crucial aspect of the billing process, there is excellent news about new technologies on the market that can assist with carrying the load. Software solutions with intelligent mechanization can supersede manual processes, clerical mistakes, client notices, and lost income with automatic customer billing functionality. Once in place, this component directly translates into expanded net collections and more earnings for the lab.

Labs have long depended on mostly manual processes for billing. It was the official way of doing business in the past when margins were dense. Today, lab operators are getting pressed by market pressures and soaring operational costs. Labs need to be open to transformation and automation to survive the storm.

Today’s software solutions enable labs to scale their operations to meet customers’ growing needs, like school districts, health departments, extensive health systems, businesses, and more.

Customer Billing Operations are Incredibly Complex

To help put billing in perspective, labs should consider the growing intricacies associated with customer billing. There is no longer a single price for a set of services for a certain period. Now customers expect things like volume markdowns and other credits on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For instance, a lab processes 10,000 specimens one day for a customer, and they process 20,000 the next day, and after that 40,000, with a discount on every 50,000 tests. Guess how hard it is to calculate and operationalize all of this with manual processes accurately.

Also significant, some customers expect labs to accommodate patients with alternate payment methods. So, not only do labs have rolling totals and deals to contend with, but they also have a combination of payment methods to account for. This gets even more problematic when you assess the potential results if double-billing were to happen.

These are just some reasons automated billing is essential for labs. Contact us today if you need support with your medical laboratory supplies. We are here to help you remain profitable.