Rebadging: When your team joins ours

Many independent orthopedic providers would like to find a middle way between outsourcing their revenue cycle management and keeping billing and coding in-house. Some have tried outsourcing, only to have to bring it back in-house again later to address quality and service concerns. Some would like to outsource, but don’t want to lose the relationships and institutional knowledge built up in their current team.

“Rebadging” is a great way to thread the needle between the two options, but it’s not risk-free.

Orthos has successfully integrated several billing, coding, and authorization teams who formerly worked inside independent providers.

Here we share our 5 keys to success in rebadging revenue cycle teams.

1. People first

   Rebadging means changing employers, so paychecks and benefits now come from Orthos. Especially for team members with seniority, this can be a surprising change. Providing transition support starts with fair compensation and benefits, ensuring that previous raises, bonuses, and expectations are honored to the greatest extent possible. We benchmark every aspect of compensation and benefits to ensure no one is worse off with us.

2. Welcoming into a new community

   The benefit of being part of Orthos is the chance to have peer support and mentorship specifically in billing and coding. Providing a supportive environment for professional development can be a major asset for retaining excellent team members. Our focus on the orthopedic specialty means no one has to be on their own when tacking a tricky payor or case.

3. Turning the page

   Orthos takes responsibility for improving the quality of revenue cycle outcomes, so we won’t assume we can just keep doing things the way they have always been done. Implementing tight quality control and clear standards means processes and job responsibilities may need to change. In many cases we can help billers and coders advocate for needed improvements and provide resources to help design and implement fixes. Bringing in new oversight and leadership can get fresh eyes on old problems. And we have seen different situations enough times to have pattern recognition about issues and the standard of what good looks like.

4. Benefiting from experience

   We encourage our adopted team members to keep up their existing relationships and culture with their former employer (now our client), leveraging everything they have learned over the years to help understand the potential issues, ensure patients are well cared for, and help everyone be comfortable with the new company. Especially with smaller independent providers, many billing and coding team members will be the ones with the logins and post-it notes that help the practice run smoothly and we try to transition all the other responsibilities deliberately and thoughtfully.
   
   

5. Knowing who to call

   And from the other side, we work very diligently to ensure that avenues of communication are kept up. Whether communication used to take place in person, by phone, by IM, within the EMR, on paper, by fax, or any other way, we make sure that every question can get answered promptly and new forms of communication are as robust as possible. Typically our team works remotely and we bring our resources from across the country to help, so we help facilitate paperless process improvements and other needed changes to support the new arrangement.

These are common elements in our experience but ultimately every rebadging opportunity is unique. We work very hard to strike the right balance between bringing in an outside group and benefiting from all the existing experience in the current team. Done right, rebadging can be a great “middle way” between keeping billing and coding in house and fully outsourcing a critical business function.