During our webinar with Kareo (@gokareo, #kareowebinar) today on choosing and managing a third-party medical billing service, one of our attendees commented that it seemed like we were predicting that billing professionals were going to lose their jobs in droves, thanks to the trend toward outsourcing medical billing.  Nothing could be further from our view!  If you’re a medical biller currently working inside a practice, and you’re wondering if the outsourcing trend is a negative for your career, our take at C&M is that the trend towards outsourcing medical billing (which itself is driven by two other key trends: increasing billing complexity and improvements in billing and EHR software) should mean more opportunity for you in the future.  But you might need to expand your vision for how your career will unfold.

As billing services proliferate — and cloud-based tech companies like Kareo, eClinicalWorks, Athenahealth and others up the ante by creating their own services to take advantage of their integrated practice management and EHR platforms — demand for experienced and knowledgeable billers will only increase. The key difference is that new jobs for billers are being created more quickly in billing services than in practices.

While jobs inside practices may gradually become harder to come by, the growing market for outsourced medical billing services will not only maintain or even expand the total number of billing jobs available, there will be much more variety in the types of jobs, too.  Billers will have the chance to work in organizations with other like-minded professionals, perhaps even specializing on a medical specialty or other billing niche if they are so inclined. And cloud-based tech platforms like Kareo’s allow motivated and entrepreneurial billers to set up their own services much more quickly and easily than ever before — and allow billers to offer great technology to their practice clients as well.

We foresee a great future for medical billers — with more options, whether as employees or business owners, and more career growth and flexibility in the future. It’s a great time to be a medical billing professional!

About the Author: Laurie Morgan

Learn more about my background at: linkedin.com/in/lauriemorgan