You’ll see that there are lots of different experience levels and personalities in people who undertake outsourcing work. You should try to screen, as much as possible, for those who are able to work independently with little to no hand-holding. Obviously, if you have to spend a lot of time helping or giving direction, you might as well be doing the work.

If you find a person who is really good at what they do, do what you are able to keep that person working for you. The opposite is true when you are bogged down by people who slack off or create problems. They are usually let go if the situation justifies it. So it only makes good business sense to even be willing to pay your best performers a little more than those who are more average.

Plan well before you implement an extensive or complex project. List out everything that will be made less difficult by being listed. This can help make things simple. You’ll need your list to generally be as clear as it can be for all involved. Keep all the duties that have to be done as easy and straightforward as you can. Document every little thing for your outsourcees so that these individuals have as much guidance as they need. Be sure that everyone is on the identical page about what needs to be accomplished each day before you hire any one.

If you have got a large project with time lines and objectives, then put status updates into effect. Ensuring that your targets are clear is essential. You can even schedule reminders for yourself using your email client to remind you of imperative dates for milestones and expected updates from your workers. Don’t simply rely upon the sticky notes you typically fix to your lcd screen and desk’s top. Make every attempt to be as professional with yourself and other people as necessary.

Believe it or not, sometimes you can certainly talk about most things simply. This is when you need to be positive that you know exactly you need from the people you’ve hired to do the job for you. Make sure they realize what you want. You’ll discover that, when you first start working along with your team your communication skills might be put through a few tests but work hard to formulate your skills further so that your team can do well.

It feels bad when you lose cash (yet again) on unique article wizard. Yet, the outcomes you were assured aren’t happening? You could have ended all that if you only understood about unique article wizard.

Somewhere along the way you found the term Virtual Assistant. It sounded interesting so you decided you wanted to learn more. Once you studied the subject, you decided that this would be the perfect solution for you. You knew it was time to hire a Virtual Assistant. But then, you didn’t know how to go about doing it.

Where do you find a Virtual Assistant? What kind of VA do you need? Can you afford one? How would you contact them? How would this all work?

Before you start Googling ‘Hire a Virtual Assistant’, there are some things you need to work out beforehand. For example:

1. What kinds of tasks do you want them to take on? Write it out with as much detail and structure as you possible can. 2. Are you comfortable with working with someone virtually? Can you handle not being able to see someone fact to face? 3. How many hours do you think youll need them for each week/month? 4. How much can you afford to budget for this? Take into account how much more productive you will be during those hours that your Virtual Assistant will be freeing you up. For example, if your hourly rate is $200, at $50 per hour for a Virtual Assistant, for that same $200 you can free up 4 hours, opening your availability to make an additional $800.

Once youve worked these things out, its time to find your candidates. You could probably Google Virtual Assistant + whatever niche or specialty youre looking for and then try contacting them one by one but this would be incredibly time consuming and not the best solution. There are a number of different Virtual Assistant Networking sites and Associations that not only maintain directories of Virtual Assistants by specialty, but also allow you to post an RFP, a request for proposal.

There are several Virtual Assistant Associations, Networks and Forums that keep directories of Virtual Assistants by specialty. They also allow you to place an RFP or Request For Proposal whereby you write a detailed description of what your needs are.

Some of the most popular sites are:

* IVAA or International Virtual Assistants Association * VANetworking.com * Virtual Assistant Forums * A Claytons Secretary * Find Virtual * Home Secretarial Services * Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce

Once youve posted your RFP, just sit back and relax. Youll get an influx of proposals from qualified, professional Virtual Assistants ready to partner with you. From there its just a matter of connecting with them and discerning which one you feel the most comfortable with.

ClaimCare Medical Billing Services has interviewed countless candidates that have just graduated from a medical billing school and coding school. As a rule, we find that the courses in a medical billing school (and coding school) add little value or knowledge to the resume of an individual with no prior medical billing experience.

In fact, when I do hire a medical billing school graduate they typically are started along side inexperienced new hires in our apprenticeship program. They start at the same pay and in need of almost the same training as individuals that have not spent the money or time on medical billing school. I would say at best, they start 3 months further up the learning curve than a completely inexperienced hire. This translates to about $0.50 per hour difference for 3 months (at best).

The reason for this is that the academic knowledge gained from medical billing school rarely translates well into practical, hands on medical billing skills. If anything, medical billing companies find that we have to undo incorrect concepts and lessons that have been learned in medical billing school. In addition, medical billing students often believe they have nothing left to learn and this makes them poor students in the real lessons of medical billing.

A better path into medical billing is to avoid spending money on a medical billing school and instead spend time finding a medical billing company or doctor’s practice that will let you start your medical billing career by calling on medical claims or verifying patient insurance information prior to the patient’s appointment.

These tasks are critical to successful medical billing and they build a strong base of medical billing skills. In addition, you will earn an income while building a resume that can get you a more advanced medical billing job.

Finding a company that will allow you to start with these basic medical billing tasks may take a bit more effort than applying to medical billing school, but in the end you will have better medical billing skills, have a better resume and earn money while you learn the medical billing craft.

The certified coder that does not already have medical billing experience is typically hard pressed to find a coding position. Once, however, your have medical billing experience you can get real value from a certified coder certificate.

So, if you want to break into the field of medical billing please consider pursuing an apprenticeship model it will serve you (and your future employer) much better than a medical billing school education.

Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II

Medical billing is a critical service that supports healthcare providers by submitting claims and collecting payments from insurance companies and patients. Medical billing specialists need to be experts to guarantee that the bills are in full and in a speedy manner. It is quite common for over 20% of a practice’s collectable revenue to remain unclaimed because of improper coding and ineffective collection tactics.

Outsourcing medical billing is growing in popularity as a method for addressing this remarkable loss of practice income. The range of outsourcing options runs from exceedingly large organizations to individual freelancers working from home to provide medical billing services.

In thinking through the billing options available, it is essential to understand that medical billing is complicated and requires deep expertise and expansive experience. When a specialty is involved, such as cardiology billing, the requirements for success become even harder to realize. Success requires that the medical billing company have a team that is knowledgeable in the complex rules utilized by insurance companies to judge cardiologists’ medical claims.

The choice of an experience billing provider has become all the more important for cardiologists as they watch their cost rocket upwards. With their margins shrinking they must be confident that their medical billing service is collecting every dollar the cardiologist is owed. Selecting the proper medical billing service is made all the more difficult by the fact that many companies claiming to be experts in billing for cardiovascular practices actually do not do the billing themselves, but outsource the work to other vendors that are based in India or work from their homes.

Deep familiarity and comfort with cardiology procedures and terminology does not come from serving one or two cardiologists. Cardiac billing success requires both broad and deep expertise in order to collect all of the money owed the cardiologist and successfully appeal claims which have been denied or answer questions the payers may have about a claim.

A company that does not encompass a wide range of cardiovascular billing experience will find it difficult to track underpayments since multiple procedure rules and cardiovascular procedures have significantly more complicated contractual adjustments than a typical family doctor or internist’s claims. In addition, the billing software and system design of a generalist billing company will often be insufficient for the more complicated requirements of reporting and insurance follow-up required in billing for cardiovascular practices.

It is not only insurance billing that is more complicated for cardiologists; patient billing is also more difficult. The patients often have high balances, complicated explanations from their payers and do not understand all of the invoices they are receiving from their cardiologist. A billing company that has strong cardiology billing experience has spoken with patient about such statements many times before. A less skilled patient collection effort could leave the cardiologists with less money and unhappy patients.

The safest way for a cardiologist to navigate the medical billing land mines outlined in this article is to travel the medical billing battlefield with a surgical billing service that has deep and proven expertise in traversing the cardio billing hazards. Family doctors should not be performing open heart surgery and generalist medical billing companies should not be providing medical billing services to cardiologists.

Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II

A well designed and executed Revenue Cycle Denial Management system can improve a medical practice or facility’s collections by up to 20 percent. If your medical billing team or medical billing company does not have a proper denial management system in place then you are, without question, losing money.

Some medical billers believe denial management is the same as follow-up, others believe denial management is primarily geared towards dealing with issues around medical necessity. Many medical billing experts simply think as denial management as a description for the overall medical billing process.

A good start to finding out if your practice is suffering from improper denial management is to find out from your medical billing service (or in-house medical billing manager) how they manage denials and how they measure success in this area.

Few billing departments appreciate the value a good Revenue Cycle Denial Management system can bring to a medical practice or facility. A robust Revenue Cycle Denial Management system provides methodical management data for the billing process; the data are then used to (a) increase and (b) accelerate cash flow.

Achieving powerful results from denial management requires data, data and more data. Your denial management system must report and measure all claims that are being denied by your payers. With this level of data your medical billing specialists can fix the issues that are leading to the denials (whether it be issues with the claims or issues with the payers) and stop the torrent of unpaid claims into your medical billing process. Once you do this, then revenues for your practice will increase; probably by 10 to 20 percent.

Three elements are typically missing from a practice or medical billing company’s denial management process: data, filtering/sorting methodologies and feedback to systematically correct errors. Most practice management systems do not properly track denials – at least not in the form in which they are typically used (i.e., they may have the capability, but only if properly implemented and used). Those PMs that do track denials typically overwhelm the practice with data that is difficult to utilize for high level denial management. Finally, even if the data is captured and can be properly utilized, most billing groups do not have a systematic way to get the information back into the billing process in a manner that prevents the denials from occurring again in the future.

Your denial management system must 1) Track all denials by payer; 2) Report on the reason for the denials and the number of claims denied for each reason; and 3) Allow for in depth analysis and comparison across payers to identify important trends. Once these capabilities are in place, the medical billing specialists can create targeted process changes and claim edits/rules that will fix systemic billing issues and increase collections.

With the analytical capabilities available, the medical billing department or medical billing company can identify systemic medical billing problems, create and test solutions to the problems and implement process changes that will increase collections AND drive down medical billing costs. One example of this is pursuit of Clean Claim Law violators with the denial data produced from the denial management system.

A real Revenue Cycle Denial Management system gives you a way to optimize and accelerate cash flow. It also prevents your practice from falling victim to the games that insurance companies play with your reimbursements. An established and proven denial management system will improve your revenues between 5 and 20 percent.

Copyright 2008 by Carl Mays II

I’m sure most of us got into home business and came to the internet to earn a good living, provide value to the community and have some semblance of freedom, right? We’ll why are you working longer hours and feel less free as an entrepreneur? It’s probably because we don’t know when to let go and start outsourcing some of the mundane tasks that prevent us from truly having that freedom.

Now granted, when you are just starting out, outsourcing may be the furthest thing from your mind. However, even if you are just starting to get your feet wet, I want you to start thinking about what you do best and what you don’t. I remember starting a home business on Ebay years ago that took off and I couldn’t control the sales if I wanted to.

After several months I needed to hire an assistant to help me with shipping, customer service and auction posting as it grew so fast. The point is that your internet business will grow to a point where it is impossible to manage every detail and this in when outsourcing becomes your best friend.

That said, you must be especially careful to choose the right people to handle the tasks with the same level of professionalism and expertise that you would. It is also important to outsource tasks that are very mundane and straightforward as opposed to tasks that can ultimately determine the success or failure of your internet marketing business.

Examples of this are tasks such as answering emails, keeping track of stocks and sales figures and so on. These jobs are very simple and often repetitive which make them easier to learn and less likely to screw up. Again, never let someone else make decisions that will greatly affect your internet business if you do not want to risk losing it overnight.

Now let’s get down to the bottom line, how do you pay your new hires. It depends on how often you need their services. In the beginning you may be able to hire a freelancer on a periodic basis as you need them, but as business picks up you may consider hiring them on a full or part time basis. Full timers would be paid hourly and your freelancers would be paid on a per project basis.

Now when it comes to project work, you are only required to pay them once based on a job done according to your previously agreed specifications. You can find reputable freelancers in several places right on the net. A couple popular sites you should familiarize yourself with are www.rentacoder.com and www.elance.com.

Okay, now that you have a couple of strong resources to outsource freelancers for your internet marketing business, it’s time to build it up to the point where they are needed. The leverage and time freedom that comes with outsourcing is a very freeing experience and will give you the opportunity to increase your sales and profitability exponentially. When the time comes, don’t delay and have fun with it.

One last thing, Dream! Continue to set your vision and goals for your business in such a way that you are forced o move from you comfort zone. It can only grow if you exercise thoughts and ideas that perhaps you thought too lofty at once. To your continued success!

Webmasters have discovered the way to keep readers happy is to provide fresh content. If you have a small website you may be able to write your own articles. In some cases, however, you may want to consider the services of a ghostwriter.

A ghostwriter is a professional writer hired to write various projects such as books, articles, stories, speeches, etc. that is attributed to someone else. The person who hires the ghostwriter to write for them receives all rights to the work.

There are several reasons one may decide to use the services of a ghostwriter. I have listed 4 of these reasons below:

1. Your website is growing and you can’t write fast enough. Your website visitors will only continue coming to a site that provides consistent fresh content. A website that doesn’t provide new content for their visitors is like inviting friends over for dinner and serving them leftovers from last week. I can assure you they will not quickly return to your house for dinner! Nor will your website visitors return to your website if they find the same content over and over. What need is there to return?

A consistent update with custom articles written by a ghostwriter (or yourself if you have the time and talent) will insure your visitors will come back for more. That’s why blogs are so popular. The content is always changing. The visitor knows he will get the latest update. The bottom line is simply this: the more visitors you have coming to your website the better are your chances to make money. The fresher, updating content you put on your site the more traffic you will have. If your website traffic is increasing fast, you will also need to update fast and that usually means you need help. A ghostwriter can help you keep that traffic coming.

2. You can sell but you can’t write. Yep, it’s true that some people can’t write and you may be one of them. In fact, you may even think you don’t need articles because all you are doing is “selling widgets”. On the contrary, you do need content of all sorts even if you aren’t planning to use articles to drive traffic to your site. You need: product descriptions, pre-sell pages, thank-you pages and about-us pages to name a few. You need all sorts of informational pages on your site or it will become a dull, boring blight on the internet landscape. The truth is your site will die if you don’t keep it alive with interesting information that keeps people returning.

Thankfully, there are people who can write and who love to write. Ghostwriters are in the business of writing articles, product descriptions, press releases, content pages of all kinds – and you can legally pretend that you were the author. By hiring a ghostwriter you can now focus on selling and customer service and smile all the way to the bank.

3. Time is limited and you simply don’t have time to write. Many webmasters hold down a full time job and work on the Internet in their spare time. Maybe you have a dozen plus websites and can’t keep up the pace of writing for so many sites to keep them fresh. Maybe you’re a full-time wife and mother.

Whatever the reason many website owners simply don’t have time to dedicate to writing content. The good news is that even if you are working 40 hours a week on a full time job, or 24 hours a day as a wife and mother you can still earn money on the Internet. Yes, you still need good, quality content. Thankfully it’s not hard to locate a qualified content ghostwriter these days! By using the services of a ghostwriter “you can have your cake and eat it too”, meaning you can keep your current job or role as wife and mother and build up a nice Internet business on the side. What a deal.

4. You hate to write. You really shouldn’t even try to write if you hate it. But, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t own a website! Usually one would be told, “Don’t go into that business if you hate it so much”, but with building websites you can hate to write and still build a very successful business. Yes, the surest path to failure is to work in a career one hates. Can you imagine a pastor who hates people? Or, a chef who hates to cook?

The good news is that you can hate to write (and websites require lots of writing) and still have a huge success story when you start outsourcing your content writing to ghostwriters. So, if you simply hate to write don’t fret! Chalk it up as one more reason to outsource your content to a qualified ghostwriter. Not that you really need a reason; outsourcing is good business, allowing you to double and triple your income without doubling or tripling your workload. What other reason do you need?

What do presidents, candidates, political debaters and Internet Marketers have in common? Writers. We all need innovative content.

The political leader engages a speech writer; the webmaster outsources to a freelance article writer. Both entities are ghostwriters who receive no credit for his work. The speaker or webmaster receives all the glory.

Ghost/speech writers have been hired by our political leaders for 100’s of years. It has been reported that Alexander Hamilton was the speech writer for George Washington. If that is factual, then Alexander Hamilton is probably the most famous ghostwriter of all times.

A ghost writer is a writer who works for hire and upon culmination of the project relinquishes all rights to the project. Nearly all politicians use ghost writers to write their memoirs, correspondence and speeches. Webmasters use ghost writers to write their articles because they either don’t have the time or talent to keep their website updated with original, tailored content.

We will explore and explain the process of hiring a ghostwriter to write those original articles for your website. Following are a few points to help with the process:

Be prepared. Do not talk with a ghostwriter without being aware of what you want. Do you require technical data? Will the articles demand in-depth research? How many words do you require? What idea do you wish the article to communicate?

Don’t tell the ghostwriter to “write me an article on weight loss” – a subject that has a multitude of subtopics and methods. If you don’t understand what you want I can promise you the ghostwriter will not please you, no matter how much they charge or how seasoned they are. They are writers, not wizards.

Be professional. If you wish to engage a freelance writer but you don’t have a clue as to what they charge or how they work you could end up losing your shirt. Hop over to Google and search for “custom articles”, “freelance writers” and “ghost writers” and see what the going rates are. Some will publish their fees on their web page.

Some will publish their rates on the Internet. When you find what the “going rate” for ghosted articles is you can develop your budget for the expense. Or, after the research you may determine you can’t afford a ghost writer.

Ask for a quotation. Many times web sites will post their fees so you can easily determine what the project will cost. At other times you may need to ask for a quotation.

Or, perhaps you are posting on one of the freelance websites such as elance.com or getafreelaner.com. As indicated in Item #1 – Be Prepared. Cover the following points in your query or posting: a) article length (words) b) article Topics c) deadline for the finished work d) your budget for article writing, and e) the method of payment. 

Be Very Specific. What do you require? Believe it or not there is a difference in “content articles” for your website visitors to read and “keyword articles” written to improve your SEO (search engine optimization).

Perhaps you want both. If so, does the freelancer have expertise in people-pleasing content that will also delight the search engines and boost your search engine ranking?

Keep in mind your profit margin. Never overpay for your articles. Be sure to keep good records of income vs. expenditures and don’t forget that the reason you are hiring a ghost writer to write those custom articles for your website is to increase the flow of traffic, hence the earnings, to your website.

Right now, the Australian Information Technology labour market is a very tight one; it’s difficult to find IT staff to hire at all, let alone retain them for any length of time. It recruitment agencies specialize in finding IT staff offshore. Even worse, Australian IT staff are expensive; people who work in white collar jobs tend to want to be paid more than blokes who work with their hands, and IT staffers are no different. An outsourcing business will enable you to save up to sixty per cent of you wage bill.

Offshore IT recruitment agencies may be able to assist your business by providing you access to IT staff from around the world. Completing a cost benefit analysis will reveal whether the use of an outsourcing business is suitable for your company. In the current times it is becoming very common practice for people and businesses to work from home without ever going to the office.

The first benefit is that an outsourcing business can cut costs, dramatically. The use of offshore IT recruitment agencies can be used for your ‘grunt level’ jobs; these are people who do basic web programming or install applications on your servers. Some have success moving this on to graphic designers and search engine optimization specialists, and there are a few who try it with copy writers, however, jargon can sometimes be confusing between countries, even the English speaking nations like Australia and Great Britain.

Using offshore IT recruitment agencies also provides you with a larger pool of people to choose your staff from. It is possible to get highly educated, English speaking people to do work of the highest standard if you are to use an outsourcing business. The Philippines has the opposite dilemma to Australia. They have too many degree educated IT staff in the labour hire market. This results in the wage cost being reduced.

Using an outsourcing business can enable your business to go online without the huge costs. It is estimated sixty per cent of businesses receive increased sales when they go online. Using IT recruitment agencies will ensure you get the right staff to get the job done the way you want it. Outsourcing business will give you instant access to staff with all the skills you require in your business.

If your already online you may wish to reduce your workload and focus on the core competencies of your business. IT recruitment agencies will make sure your staff are of the highest standard. The only person who can get your business to grow is you. The secret to the growth and development of your company is to increase the range of skills set at your disposal.

Using IT recruitment agencies is paramount to growing and developing your business both online and offline. Outsourcing business will increase your businesses productivity and capabilities without the cash flow problems most businesses experience.

Submitting clean claims is critical to a strong medical billing process. A fundamental element of good process design is to catch problems as soon in the process as you can. Correcting a diagnosis error before a claim is submitted may take 5 minutes; correcting it after the claim has been denied will take well over an hour (and it will delay collections by 3o or more days).

Implementing a process that submits clean claims can lead to days in AR of less than 45.

The leading medical billing services utilize scrubbers that ensure your claims are clean before they are submitted to payers. These scrubs accelerate the speed of collections by avoiding denials and delays. They also increase collections by minimizing the volume of “re-work” and allowing billing staff to focus their efforts on pursuing true collections improvement opportunities and not simply resubmitting claims that should have been paid the first time. As a result of these scrubbers, over 90% of claims submitted are paid upon first submission. These “scrubbers” include:

- A baseline scrubber. This scrubber insures that the claim has at least the basic information such as a social security number, properly formatted insurance id number, etc.

- Scrubber that checks coding, bundling, and procedure information versus local Medicare and CCI rules. This scrub assures better coding, identifies overlooked procedures or codes.

The scrubbers outlined above are a basic service that any medical billing company should offer. Medical billing companies should also be able to utilize medical billing specific know-how and business intelligence created over time through work with many clients across specialties and geographies to create their own proprietary set of claim scrubbing rules. This third type of scrubber is a:

- Dynamic Proprietary Rule scrubber that checks for optimal coding and documentation versus each particular payer or plan’s rules. This scrub assures that each claim is optimized for clean submission. When the payer or plan’s rules change or when the billing office detects a systemic issue they should update the scrubber to filter and fix problems before claims are submitted. These specialized scrubbers differentiate the Tier one medical billing companies from the rest of the crowd and can make a significant collections difference.

Medical Practices will see a significant improvement in both the speed and the magnitude of collections if the begin using the scrubbers outlined above. With all of the technology payers employ to minimize the amount they pay to providers, it is difficult to survive without utilizing these scrubbers.

Copyright 2008 Carl Mays II