Gina Thatcher

I start my day just the same as anyone else. I get up, get in the shower, brush my teeth, brush my hair, get dressed, and go to work. The only difference is that I don’t set an alarm, I put on my sweats, I don’t have a commute, and I don’t punch a time clock. For my lunch break, I catch up on my weekly television shows from my DVR with a homemade lunch. My profession is medical billing. I am my own boss, and I work from home.

You may wonder how I found myself in this field. I actually went to culinary school after high school. But it just wasn’t my thing. I left college, moved back in with my parents, and got a job at the local payday loan business. I placed flyers on car windshields and was verbally abused daily by car owners, business owners, and my own regional manager. Needless to say, it was an awful job. Just two doors down from the payday loan business was a sign for a new medical supply business. Weeks later, there was a grand opening celebration. There were electric scooters and wheelchairs galore. I walked in, checked the place out, and recognized a face from another local medical supply store that I had once applied for a job with. This person had told me once before that it was only a family business and that she did not hire outside of the family. A man approached me and introduced himself as the owner. I asked if he was looking for anyone to work for him. He asked about my experience. Of course, my only experience relevant to his business was retail.

The next day, I arrived with my résumé, and within the week, I was hired as a customer care representative. Over the course of a year and a half, I worked in both stores, selling adult diapers, wheelchairs, compression hose, and other various medical supplies. I even delivered and set up medical equipment in people’s homes. In between customers (patients), the manager (medical biller) would give me small, tedious medical billing tasks. I copied from old claim forms, making corrections onto new ones on a typewriter. Yes, that’s right—a typewriter! Mistakes were out of the question; these were two-part carbon copy claim forms. I filled out forms that were to be sent to physicians for their signatures on medical necessity justification forms, and any other insurance authorization documents. I did filing.

Eventually, I moved to another city and got a job with a medical billing service, working for a man that was obsessed with cats, there were several living in the office. The employees were expected to feed the cats and clean littler boxes. I first worked as a courier, picking up and delivering paperwork to and from numerous physicians’ offices. After a short while, I was given a small Medicaid account as my own account to bill for. This job was not for me because of the feline environment and extra duties taking care of them. I was there to be a medical biller. Given my past durable medical equipment (DME) experience at the medical supply store, I soon found a job with a DME supply store specializing in custom wheelchairs. I gained much experience in the field of medical billing working there. Custom wheelchairs have very specific requirements that qualify a patient’s insurance to cover them. That is what I did at this job. I was given a patient’s name and the wheelchair that best suited them, selected by a specialist in the field. Then I determined whether the insurance company would cover this wheelchair and what information the company needed in order to pay. Getting the information and/or authorization could take weeks, or even months. After I obtained that information, I was done with my part. It then went on to be billed—hopefully paid, but possibly rebilled and maybe even appealed after that.

I then relocated, and my job search was on again. I got a job with a DME store fifty miles from my home. This time, the position I was hired for was very boring, and I was way overqualified. I was on the hunt for another job. I interviewed for an in-house billing position at a general physician’s office and got the job. This was my first billing service client. I worked in-house for a little less than a year. I was still commuting an hour each way and one hundred miles a day. I found a local job with the hospital in my town. I went to the physician I was doing in-house billing for and told him that I had gotten another job locally and was going to take it. I then proposed that I still work for him remotely on my own time. I have to admit, I was quite nervous to be giving this doctor an ultimatum. To my surprise and excitement, he went for it. He asked me to write something up that we could agree upon and present it to him. I then worked for the hospital during the day and came home and did the physician billing in the evening. What I used to spend an eight-hour day in the office doing, I now did in only a couple of hours a night. I collected more doctors until I no longer needed the job with the hospital because I was so busy with my medical billing services.

Now don’t let my long story of hard work get you down. The reason I am wrote this book is so that you can have the knowledge to skip all that stuff. The book is not intended to teach you how to do medical billing itself but to help you gain the knowledge of how to build your business. I have seen the front and back of many professional offices. With this experience, I have collected all the dos and don’ts of being a medical billing service. When I wrote my first contract, I didn’t know what I was doing. I wish that I’d had all the knowledge I do today.