When medical secretary Maxine Mealey decided to manage her consultant’s billing in-house, she found ePractice made the process quick, easy and cost-effective.
Maxine Mealey has worked for consultant pain specialist and anaesthetist, Dr Andy King, since he established his own Surrey-based private practice five years ago and she has just started working for his colleague, Dr Tim Bates.
Dr King’s pain management clinics at BMI Runnymede and Nuffield Woking hospitals attract more than 10 new patients each week who are hoping for relief from persistent discomfort caused by sports injuries and post-operative pain as well as chronic conditions such as sciatica or nerve damage.
As a medical secretary for this growing practice, Maxine has always been responsible for non-clinical matters, from patient liaison to marketing but the billing process was a notable exception.
She explains: “I first worked with Dr King 7 years ago at an orthopaedic clinic in Woking which had outsourced billing to an external provider and we continued to use them when he started to practice independently. However, after four years, I was finding it quite labour intensive to collate all the necessary information and deal with any problems that arose. What’s more, we might typically invoice £20,000 in a month but then we would have to pay 3% of our revenue plus VAT for the service. That amounted to quite a large sum over the course of a year and I thought: ‘Well, if I’m doing 60% of the work already, I can do the rest!’
“We selected the Healthcode system to help me manage the billing process because our billing company and hospitals used them. I knew there had to be a good reason why.”
With the help of Healthcode’s customer service team, Maxine was up-and-running with ePractice in less than a week. “I have some experience with financial systems in previous jobs and I was impressed with how user-friendly and straightforward Healthcode’s online solution was,” she says. “This has enabled me to take on the extra work of creating and submitting around 80 invoices each month within my usual working hours. We have also been able to cut the number of errors and I have found we are getting paid much quicker.”
She is particularly impressed with the ease that she can track outstanding invoices on the system: “The status page is the best feature of ePractice. I can see the current invoice position at a glance every time I log on and click on the graph if I need more details, without the need to generate a report each time. And when I do need to produce financial reports, it has then been very easy to export the file and send it to our accountant.”
She concludes: “ePractice has made it simple and cost-effective for us to manage billing and payments successfully in-house. I would absolutely recommend it to other practices.”