There are many critical stops to make in the journey towards your medical billing company selection. Reference checking is one of the most important stops along the road. There are several steps that must be taken to ensure through reference checking.

These elements include properly defining the type of references that will be meaning for you (e.g., what specialty, geography, length as a client, number of providers, primary payers, etc), obtaining success and failures as references, determining with whom you wish to speak at the references, developing an interview guide for your reference calls, conducting the reference checks, synthesizing the results of the checks and making a final decision about the billing company. The main focus of this article is creating an effective interview guide.

An interview guide is your roadmap for the interview calls that insures you ask everything required to make a good decision. The first step in developing the interview guide is writing out the best and worst case scenarios for the potential billing company. With this in hand create a list of questions that will help you determine where along the spectrum between your two scenarios your potential medical billing service may lie.

It is critical to ensure that your questions are specific enough that you can come away with real facts from the reference calls. You do not want to ask broad questions like "Are you happy with this company's performance?" Such questions are open to much interpretation and are driven by the individual's previous experiences.

You can overcome this problem by asking targeted questions that get to the root of what is important to you. If you really care about timely filing issues ask "How many times has this billing company missed a timely filing deadline?"

Have you ever taken notes during a call and afterwards had trouble deciphering them? If you have you are not alone. A good way to combat this is to leave about a quarter of a page after each question (and sub question) to make sure you can write the answers on the same page with the questions. You have one final to-do before you start making calls. Review your questions with the following thought in mind "Will I be able to make a go no-go decision after these calls?" If not, what questions are you missing? Once you know that you have all your questions in order start scheduling your reference checks.

When you make the call make sure to confirm how long you have to speak with the individual and pace your call accordingly. You want to make sure you get through each of your questions with each of the references. If someone starts to linger too long on a single question or takes the call off on a tangent, make sure to get them back on track by letting them know you have a list of question you want to make sure you get covered during the call. End the call by thanking the person and asking for permission to call back if you have any additional questions.

Do not hesitate to call back your earlier references if one of the later ones brings up an important potential benefit or concern that you had not considered. You want to insure you hear what all of the references have to say about this new point.

Following the process outlined above will insure that you gather the factual information required to make an informed decision about your medical billing service.

Copyright 2008 by Medical Billing Services Buying Guide.