Medical billing support: dedicated FTE, shared hours or a percentage fee?

Before comparing quotes, separate two questions: how much staff capacity do you need, and how will the service be priced? A dedicated person and a percentage fee describe different parts of an arrangement.

Dedicated FTE (full-time equivalent) support

This gives you an agreed amount of full-time capacity. Ask whether the person is exclusively assigned to your practice, what hours are covered, who supervises the work and what happens during leave. Paying for a full-time allocation does not, by itself, define the tasks included or guarantee a particular number of completed claims.

Shared or part-time support

If the workload does not fill a full-time role, compare a smaller allocation. Clarify the hours reserved for you, turnaround expectations and how urgent work is handled when the team also serves other practices.

Percentage-based service

Here the important question is what the percentage applies to and which responsibilities it buys. Ask about minimum charges, separate services and whether older outstanding claims are included. Also ask whether you receive a named contact or work through a shared team.

A practical starting point

For two representative weeks, list recurring tasks, time spent, unresolved items and work waiting on someone else. Separate temporary backlog cleanup from the ongoing weekly workload. Then give each prospective provider the same scope and ask for a proposal showing capacity, coverage, responsibilities and reporting.

For a small practice, provider count alone is not enough to choose an FTE. The mix of tasks, follow-up workload and work retained by your own team matter too.

We are InfoHub Consultancy Services (ICS), a medical billing, coding and revenue cycle support company. This is a framework for comparing proposals, not a claim that one model suits every practice.

Which is harder for your practice to estimate: the hours of support needed, or the work that will remain with your team? Please keep examples free of patient information.