Employee retention strategies for medical billing companies

There’s an underlying factor to your medical billing company’s success: your employees. They’re the foundation of your business and can make or break it. When your business faces high turnover, it’s on shaky ground.

Aimee Heckman, a healthcare consultant with more than 25 years of experience, unpacks strategies to boost employee retention, ensuring your team remains happy, efficient, and, most importantly, intact. 

The following is a summary of Heckman's the on-demand webinar “Best Practices for Employee Retention for Billing Companies.”

Employee retention = client retention and overall business success. 

High employee turnover hurts your business — even more than you might think. It’s not just the internal cost of hiring and training new employees. Each team member brings value to your business, especially in healthcare. Both their skill set and the knowledge and stability they bring to your business are valuable.

Take these examples of how frequently losing employees hurts your business:

The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that the cost of losing an employee and replacing them is equivalent to 6 to 9 months of salary or wages in recruiting and training.

That’s not the only impact. High turnover can also impact your billing clients and how they perceive you. 

Here are a few ways it hurts clients:

It’s your team members who are out there forging bonds with your clients. They’re learning and navigating unique billing procedures, reducing errors, and ensuring reimbursements happen like clockwork. It’s their friendly voices and familiar names with which your clients connect. When those connections disappear, clients feel unstable and might just lose faith in your business.

Aimee Heckman never wanted to run a billing company. She says she’s not a good biller, but her talent lies in creating great ones.

Heckman recommends the 4 Ps of employee retention:

Let’s dive in.

By far the most important, hiring the right people is critical to retaining them. It’s a competitive talent market out there, so you have to think strategically about who you want to hire and how you’re going to attract (and keep) them.

When it comes to hiring, Heckman asks you to consider hiring for what she calls “brain and work ethic” over experience. She says she rarely hires for experience and staffs her team with people who have little experience in the medical billing field. Instead, she seeks people with transferable skills who will fit within her team.

Let’s explore the pros and cons of hiring experienced billers.

Pros of experienced billers:

Cons of experienced billers:

The positives and negatives go both ways. But hiring for work ethic doesn’t mean hiring a brand new grad. It could also mean you hire from outside the billing or medical industries altogether. Here are the pros and cons of hiring for brains and work ethic.

Pros of hiring for brains and work ethic:

Cons of hiring for brains and work ethic:

Experience or brain and work ethic, there’s no one right way to hire employees. You probably need a combination of both to help you build your dream billing team with true staying power.

Now that you know who you need to hire, you have to find them. Start by building out specific job requirements for each role. Decide whether you’re hiring for experience or brains and work ethic to help you narrow down applicants.

Here are some common places to find job candidates:

Remember, hiring the right people for your medical billing practice is the best tactic to prevent employee turnover.

Don’t just give new employees a few days of training and turn them loose. There are a few things you can do upfront that will increase employee retention and improve your team overall.

Heckman suggests assigning tasks and workflows based on an employee’s natural abilities, not just their learned skills. 

For example, you shouldn’t stick a social butterfly in the corner to post charges all day. They won’t be happy in a role disconnected from people, and their productivity will decrease. Instead, put them in accounts receivable follow-up. They’ll get to interact with people more frequently and can use their outgoing personality more effectively.

While you may not be able to match people’s personalities and tasks 100% of the time, your employees will be happier and more productive when you consider them.

At some point, every employee will be unavailable for one reason or another. It’s critical to the flow of your business that every employee has a backup. They’ll have peace of mind that they can step away due to illness or even take a vacation, knowing someone is handling their work tasks.

Evaluate your current staffing and see where and who can fill the gaps — even if you’re training employees across their primary skill set.

Detailed protocols are critical to help manage employees and relieve their stress (and keep them happy). Start by setting up a comprehensive protocol for each account and system you use. 

Heckman’s team puts daily protocols in a Google Sheet for each client, from the payers to where to send claims — all the information someone needs to temporarily step in and take over.

Payroll is the single biggest expense for most companies, so it makes sense that most companies want to minimize this cost as much as possible. But fair compensation is the least you can do for your employees.

Experienced billers command higher salaries, but you need to ensure they take on tasks with higher returns on investment to account for it.

Heckman recommends 90 days of paid training for brain and work ethic hires. Consider paying $0.50 to $1 an hour less during a probation period when new employees are learning the skills of the trade. Once they reach 90 days (or sooner if they’re fast learners), offer a salary review to bump up their pay. This should help cover some onboarding costs while you get them up to speed.

Regular raises are key to employee retention. They’re great motivators and keep up with cost of living increases. Heckman recommends giving everyone annual raises at the same time every year to ensure no one slips through the cracks. 

Heckman also emphasizes the importance of bonuses to recognize employees for their hard work. Spot bonuses are great for celebrating a win, client praise, or work that goes above and beyond. It can be as simple as sending a team email publicly acknowledging the employee’s hard work and a $50 to $100 bonus. Even a Starbucks or other gift card can do wonders for motivating employees.

You can also offer a more structured bonus program. That will give employees clear goals and an incentive to reach them.

Benefits are important to employees, but costly for employers. That’s where perks come in. They can’t supplement benefits, but they go a long way to improve employee morale and prevent high turnover. 

Perks can be low or no cost to you, but they can make a big difference in your employees’ lives. Here are some quick examples:

Healthcare insurance is the single biggest employee expense, but there are ways you can make it more affordable. Some small business associations offer their members lower-cost health insurance and other benefit options. Research your local area associations for opportunities.

Who you hire for your team (and who you keep) has a huge impact on your employee turnover. That’s why Heckman recommends that you be slow to hire and quick to fire.

Why should you be quick to fire employees? Retaining poor performers negatively affects the morale of your entire team. They likely must work harder to pick up an underperformer’s slack or fix their mistakes. It’ll also impact your productivity and might even trickle down to your clients.

Heckman says that if you’re thinking about firing someone, you’ve already made the decision. You just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Paying unemployment is cheaper than hanging on to someone who isn’t cutting it.

You know the intricacies and challenges of running a company in the healthcare industry. Finding and keeping clients is your ultimate goal, but to do that, you need to find and keep your employees — they’re the heart of your business. And training new hires isn’t just time-consuming. It’s costly. 

Prevent employee turnover by putting time and energy into improving retention. A strong, consistent team doesn’t just retain clients — it propels your business forward.

Go deeper with the on-demand webinar “Best Practices for Employee Retention for Billing Companies.”