Calling all pediatric billers: it’s time to find your community, trade professional advice, and get your billing questions answered. For two years, PCC has hosted a “Billing Drop In” that offers precisely these benefits for in-house billers for pediatric practices. Once a month, billers have logged onto Zoom and challenged each other to answer their latest billing questions. Now, the team is opening the (virtual) doors. Whether you use PCC EHR or another vendor, you’re welcome to the table. After all, who knows your business better than your billing colleagues?
We Want Pediatric Practices to Get Paid.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was important to PCC to provide resources for the pediatricians, staff, billers, and patients we serve. We created software tools like an internal EHR chat function and the ability to send text messages to families, co-hosted webinars on keeping practice doors open, and did everything possible to ensure that pediatricians and their practices could continue seeing patients – and getting paid for it.
In fact, getting practices paid is so important to PCC that there is an entire team dedicated to just that. They call themselves “Get Paid”, and under their umbrella of work is everything from training practices new to PCC in using billing functions in our software to updating the software itself so that billers can more efficiently negotiate between insurance companies, practices, and patients.
Here’s the thing. Billing gets complicated quickly. (If you’re a biller reading this post, you already know this. Feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph!) Pediatric billing, with its constant shifts and changes in policy, medications, billing codes, and laws, is perhaps even more complicated. And the COVID-19 pandemic demanded and continues to demand many new stipulations on who gets paid for what and when. While we are all thrilled that pediatric vaccines for COVID-19 and RSV exist, these are just two examples of the conundrums billers are faced with: how do I get insurance companies to pay for this? Which codes do I need? What state-specific rules should I be compliant with?
PCC’s Get Paid team is always happy to field such questions for PCC clients, but they realized that they were getting many similar questions and that they, while heavily involved in the billing field, were not billers and didn’t always have the direct experience to field current need questions. So in 2021, they proposed a new idea: why not open the doors to a small virtual Zoom meeting, where billers could meet, chat, explore billing questions, and support one another?
So that’s exactly what they did. With a PCC Get Paid team member there to moderate and provide feedback and guidance, the team sent out the word and waited to see what would happen. Fast forward to 2023. The PCC Billing Drop In now occurs monthly, and sees a small community of stalwart billers and experts who arrive with their questions at the ready. Our PCC moderators report that instead of a classroom format, they are often employed in moderating questions and answers from other participants in a friendly round table setting – directing one biller to the experience of another biller who had success getting a claim paid with this modifier, or under that code.
After two years of successful meetings, the Get Paid team and PCC is now opening the (virtual) doors to all pediatric billers, regardless of which EHR they use. While some PCC software advice is offered when requested, most of the benefits of the Drop In lie in the community of billers willing and able to share trade secrets and lift one another up with friendly advice.
Want to join the community? Check out pcc.com/events for the latest Billing Drop In dates and register to get the Zoom link and details. We look forward to seeing you there!
Interested in what the team at PCC gets up to when the monthly Billing Drop In is over? Check out some of the work you can look forward to from the Get Paid team in PCC Futures.
