Often you will have your in-house people to do the billing for you. But this is a very intricate area and it’s difficult even for specialists to keep up with. A billing consultant can offer consultation to your billing staff to make sure that they have the latest and best information. On an ongoing basis, this person can offer training as new regulations are put out and other changes which are constantly happening. Every year, new reference materials are produced. There are changes in the CPT code books and certain other code books which are being used by your billing specialists. Make sure you buy them. Probably in November of the year, they may need a few hundred dollars to buy these resources. Just spend it. It’s something which they need for something that’s so critical to the operation, and financial success of your practice.

You could use your billing consultant to come in and do a review and audit of some of your charts. What you’re looking for is, have you documented what you’ve done? As the saying goes, if it wasn’t documented it wasn’t done; if it wasn’t done, you can’t bill for it. So they’re going to look for that. They’re going to look at consistency as far as the billing versus what is documented in the chart. If you have a group practice, you want to be looking for some consistency among the group physicians in what they do and how they bill for it.