Medical billing software is now an essential part of the healthcare business, be it hospitals or individual practices or insurance companies. It automates the whole process, making it so much easier to keep track of payment information, sending medical claims on time, and more.
In this article, we are going to get into details of how to create a custom billing software for hospital and how hospital billing systems pricing is formed.
Whether it is developed for an enterprise or for small practices, custom software for medical billing requires a number of features that simplify communication between patients, hospitals and insurance companies regarding finances. These include claim management, eligibility checking (monitoring patient’s insurance status), payment charging, keeping patients’ profiles and many other important things.
Complex programs like offline and web-based healthcare billing software require a set of features to enable the administrative and financial parts of the system:
With custom medical billing software development, you can design a system that fits your business goals and vision.
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Creating online software for hospital billing is not a simple process that requires thorough planning and attention to detail. Some of the key factors you should consider in pre-development stages are:
Hospital billing software deals with confidential personal data, so you need to think of ways how you are going to protect this information. Auto-backups and data encryptions are some of them. This also includes compliance with data protection policies, such as the GDPR or HIPAA.
Make sure the new system will be integrated with insurance carrier networks to simplify eligibility verification.
This includes the types of information you are going to gather and store, as well as where you are going to store it (on your servers or cloud-based).
Suffice to say, a system like that requires to be developed from scratch, so it will involve a lot of planning. Thus, the pre-development stage includes, but is not limited to deciding on the business and development aspects, such as:
Another thing is choosing the technology to build software for medical billing. Web services need front-end and back-end technology to code the application along with its features.
We’d also recommend using Sentry to catch and fix bugs while your medical billing software code is being developed.
So, how much does it cost to develop medical billing software? Developers usually charge hourly rates, regardless of whether you hire freelancers or outsource from an agency, but the cost of medical billing systems also depends on the feature set, the number of developers you hire, and other conditions. Here is an estimate of what you might pay to develop medical software if you choose to outsource from a technical partner for $60/hour.
Task/features | Time for development, h | Approx. cost, $ |
Pre-development activities: planning of website application structure, finalizing requirements, server setup, continuous integration, etc. | ~110 | 6,600 |
Core features development: - User management - CRUD functions and reminders | ~100-180 | 6,000 - 10,800 |
Standard features: - Patient profiles - Claims management - Eligibility verification - Billing tracking - Patient history | ~300-400 | 18,000 - 24,000 |
The numbers are very approximate and should be discussed with your developer or technical team. You should also take into account that not all development agencies provide design services, and if you opt for freelancers, that’s an extra expense.
Testing is an integral part of the development process, but you will need to budget software maintenance after the project is complete. Not all development agencies offer support after an application is live and working, so you might need to hire a team to provide updates and bug fixes for the product.
If you have been hatching the idea of developing software for medical billing for a long time, but at the same time ask a lot of questions about how to create medical billing software in practice, just contact us. We will be able to discuss all the necessary features, conduct additional research to meet the needs of both the market and your business.
In addition to basic features such as patient pre-registration, appointment scheduling, electronic claim process, accounting and financial management, credit card payments, encryption, and security, we can implement options that will make your products stand out from the competition.
If you want to make an online medical billing software system, the cost of development will largely depend on the type of contractor you’re going to choose (freelancer or a technical partner) and the features that you want to customize your MVP with. The number and complexity of features will influence the time needed to code the functionality.
If you decide to hire a technical partner, it good to sit down for a meeting and discuss all your ideas and medical billing software requirements to get more insight into the software development process, advice on what technology to use, and a more accurate estimate of the project’s price. So we are ready to discuss your customized medical billing solutions.