5 Top-Rated Affordable Medical Billing Software
As a medical practitioner, creating a safe patient experience is paramount for you. But if you're stuck with routine billing and insurance claim management tasks, you probably don't find the time to improve patient care and work on patient engagement.
Investing in a medical billing solution can help change this scenario. And you can do so without breaking your bank by opting for an affordable platform. Based on our research, we've considered products priced less than $75 per month as affordable software and have arranged them in ascending order. Read more.
Products featured in this article are either practice management software or electronic health records (EHR) platforms with medical billing functionality. All the products offer core medical billing software features, such as claims management, claims scrubbing, and insurance eligibility verification.
We selected products for this article based on their average ratings between December 2021 - December 2023, which may differ from their current overall average ratings.
1. Carepatron
Carepatron is a practice management platform with medical billing and coding functionality built for medical practitioners that helps digitize processes such as medical billing, online payments, appointment scheduling, and client management for your medical practice.
The software provides a built-in calendar to manage your appointments, accept online bookings, and automate payment reminders to clients. With the documentation dashboard, you can create detailed notes about patient histories, tests conducted, and prognoses for their illnesses and generate invoices. You can also store all patient information and clinical notes online.
Product features of interest:*
Patient portal: Grant your patients access to a personalized portal to view appointment and invoice records and correspond them to their medical diagnosis reports. The portal also helps change booking timings and share insurance claim records for accounting purposes.
Online payments: Let your clients use online payment gateways for greater flexibility. Such a feature also makes processing payments faster and more secure than traditional approaches such as cash and check payments.
Automated reminders: Set up automated payment reminders for recurring patients and simplify the payment process for them and your accounting team. Such functionality can also help reduce no-shows and eliminate the need to chase payments after an appointment.
Starting price: $12 per user, per month
Billing cycle: Annual
Customer support options: Email, chat, phone support, FAQs, and helpdesk
Who should consider Carepatron?
Practitioners with patients hailing from different locations can take advantage of Carepatron's AES-256 encrypted patient portal that tracks and stores appointment and billing-related information for patients. The medical practice management software features a HIPAA-compliant mobile app with bank-level encryption and payment processing integration, making it easy for patients to pay for their appointments without worrying about cash payments.
Pro tip
Look for mobile app availability along with online payments facility since it helps accept payments from patients faster. Such a feature will also help you and your staff manage and track the billing processes from anywhere, improving responsiveness and providing flexibility and convenience to both medical practitioners and patients.
2. SimplePractice
SimplePractice is an electronic health record (EHR) platform for practitioners and medical administrators that helps with insurance claim filing by providing a dashboard to create, submit, track, and reconcile patient insurance claims. The software helps you map a medical service you provide or a procedure you conduct to a specific Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code.
These codes help you communicate important information about your patients' diagnoses, treatments, and procedures to insurance companies, government agencies, and other healthcare providers. You can also automate insurance accounting with integrated payment reports, such as electronic remittance advice (ERA) reports that provide a detailed breakdown of the insurance payer's finalized claim status.
Product features of interest:*
Auto-pay: Enroll clients in the auto-pay feature to stop tracking down payments after every appointment. The feature saves patients’ credit card details and auto-deducts the amount reflected in the invoice after every successful appointment.
Insurance claim management: Create insurance claims for your patients and submit them digitally. The software automatically adds client information to claims by lifting it from patient charts.
Superbill management: Create superbills for patients who have had multiple medical procedures conducted. A superbill can act as a detailed document outlining specific procedures, the costs that the patient incurred, and the specific medical codes and modifiers employed for different types of medical services.
Starting price: $29 per user, per month
Billing cycle: Monthly
Customer support options: Chat, email, and phone support
Who should consider SimplePractice?
Practitioners handling patient insurance claims for accounting and taxation purposes and wishing to automate capturing patient information from medical charts can use SimplePractice's insurance claim-filing functionality. The software also offers a learning hub to help practitioners get more American Psychological Association (APA)-approved psychotherapy certifications and expand their scope of practice.
3. TheraNest
TheraNest is a practice management platform for physicians, therapists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors. The software helps set patient appointment reminders and lets you offer online therapy with telehealth.
You can create e-prescriptions for patients and also manage insurance billing. TheraNest helps with claim validation, reduces patient data inaccuracies and policy coverage errors, and prevents fraudulent claims by conducting background checks on patients.
Product features of interest:*
Claim outsourcing: Use a third-party team that TheraNest provides to manage your claims cycle. The team can handle claims verification and validation processes, ensuring they are free from inaccuracies related to patient information and diagnosis.
Counseling progress notes: Use DSM-5-compliant individual and group notes to categorize cases and recommend appropriate treatment plans. You can attach these notes as proof during billing to create correct estimates of treatment plans provided to patients.
Assisted claims: Get assistance from a claims billing expert who helps medical practitioners walk through claims tracking and management. You can also use a built-in dashboard to view patient insurance claims and their status in the billing cycle. A dashboard highlights electronic claim rejections and helps practitioners resubmit claims on behalf of patients via a claims portal.
Starting price: $39 per month
Billing cycle: Monthly
Customer support options: Chat, email, phone, helpdesk, and FAQs
Who should consider TheraNest?
Practitioners, just starting out, can take advantage of TheraNest for managed billing and insurance denial management. The software helps validate and create error-free claims to submit to insurance companies. Additionally, with code-based denial management, TheraNest offers a dedicated team to conduct follow-ups and track rejected claims. You can also use the software to keep track of insurance billing remittances and post the payment details in the patient portal.
Pro tip
Look for tools that help identify and address claim denials through code-based denial management. The software should assign denial codes to facilitate tracking and analysis of common denial trends. Such a process ensures clear categorization and helps implement process improvements to minimize denials.
4. TherapyNotes
TherapyNotes is an electronic health record (EHR) and behavioral health platform. The software helps verify patient insurance coverage and create e-prescriptions accordingly. Once a client submits their insurance details, you can submit insurance claims from within the software.
The software integrates with over two thousand insurance companies, making it easy to verify patient insurance eligibility by uploading their billing and insurance details. You can also use a built-in dashboard to check the status of electronic claims, view rejected claims, and resubmit them after a review.
Product features of interest:*
Real-time eligibility verification: Get detailed reports of your client's insurance coverage to help you assess their eligibility criteria for a procedure or medication part of their treatment plan. Real-time insurance eligibility enables you to make fewer calls to insurance companies before each client's first session.
Electronic remittance advice (ERAs): Upload digital versions of explanations of medical payments and adjustments from insurance companies in the form of ERAs to your TherapyNotes dashboard. Let the software automatically pull information from the ERA documents to assist with payment processing.
Merit-based incentive payment system (MIPS): Let the software capture information from your client notes and assess the measures and procedures you conducted to calculate a composite score for your performance. Once evaluated, you may receive a payment bonus as part of Medicare payment adjustments if you’re eligible.
Starting price: $49 per user, per month
Billing cycle: Monthly
Customer support options: Chat, email, phone, and helpdesk support
Who should consider TherapyNotes?
Medical professionals enrolled in the merit-based incentive payment system (MIPS) and looking to improve the quality of patient care they provide can benefit from TherapyNotes. The software helps evaluate your procedural performance and eligibility for Medicare bonus payments. The software also creates aging reports and client statements to track and showcase outstanding balances. This feature might come in handy for practitioners who often spend time chasing medical payments from patients.
5. Medisoft
Medisoft is an EHR suite with medical billing functionality that also helps with patient appointment scheduling, revenue management, and patient recovery progress reporting. The reporting tool in the software helps create custom reports on assets, revenue, medical expenses, and insurance pay analysis.
These reports provide detailed information on the charges and payments posted for specific medical procedure codes—that help define, categorize, and map each medical procedure or service provided to a patient—broken down by insurance companies. Medisoft offers a mobile app that can serve as a patient kiosk for paperless check-ins. The software features a built-in insurance card OCR scanning tool that helps capture information from the physical card, convert it to digital text and insert it in the patient’s chart and insurance claims, thus eliminating data-entry errors.
Product features of interest:*
Patient statements: Create descriptive patient statements describing the healthcare services, including dates, procedures, and the healthcare provider's information. These statements can be used for accounting and insurance claim purposes.
Appointment and activity review: Track patient payments, charges, and collection activities, flagging potential oversights, such as duplicate billing or incorrect medical procedure coding, ultimately ensuring billing accuracy.
Patient procedure estimates: Calculate accurate cost estimates for planned procedures, considering patient insurance eligibility and past medical data to ensure procedural safety.
Starting price: $69 per month
Billing cycle: Monthly
Customer support options: Chat, email, phone support, FAQs, and helpdesk
Who should consider Medisoft?
Medisoft supports various medical specialties, making it suitable for specialty practices such as dermatology, cardiology, and orthopedics that conduct procedures on patients. Medisoft's procedure cost estimation can ensure you are providing accurate cost estimates to patients and ensure accuracy during insurance claim filing.
Pro tip
Look for a seamless audit trail process in the software. Such functionality can help track changes made to a patient’s medical records, insurance claims, and billing information, ensuring maximum accuracy in the claim filing and billing process.
How much does medical billing software cost?
Medical billing tools can cost as low as $12 per user, per month, or go all the way up to $299+ per month, depending on various factors—number of patients and online consultations, number of users, and additional EHR features. Most medical billing service solutions typically include the following pricing plans:
Free trials: No-cost trial plans ranging from 15 to 30 days, giving users access to either all or limited features of the software to test out functionality. These are ideal for practitioners who wish to try out a solution before purchasing it.
Free versions: Free software plans offer basic features and/or limited premium feature access. These are ideal for small clinics or practitioners on a tight budget.
Entry-level plans: Start at $12 per month and offer limited features such as appointment scheduling and billing. These are a good option for small clinics or practitioners with basic medical billing needs.
Mid-tier plans: Range from $19 to $199 per month and offer advanced features such as telehealth, group therapy, and clinical notes. These are ideal for practitioners who have outgrown basic medical billing but don’t require the full range of functionality and scalability offered by enterprise-level medical billing tools.
High-end plans: May cost upward of $299 per month. In addition to basic and midrange features, these offer free client data import from third-party software, dedicated customer support, website creation, and clinical notes. These are ideal for large-scale practitioners with multiple clinics.
Hidden costs associated with medical billing software
Besides the software license itself, there may be additional costs associated with the medical billing software, including:
Digital services fees: Some tools have additional charges for digital services such as electronic claims, e-prescriptions, and payment processing.
Appointment reminders: Sending appointment reminders to clients via SMS and calls can sometimes have hidden charges.
Additional user fees: Adding another clinician or practitioner as a user for the software can sometimes have additional charges.
Frequently asked questions when selecting affordable medical billing software
Here are some questions that you should ask software vendors to learn more and find the best medical billing software for your business:
Does the system support automated coding suggestions based on clinical documentation?
An ideal medical billing platform should automatically suggest relevant medical code sets under The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) by identifying patterns, relationships, and relevant codes associated with the documented clinical information.
What is the frequency of software updates?
Healthcare regulations, coding standards, and billing requirements are subject to frequent changes. Software updates ensure that the system stays current with the latest regulatory standards, reducing the risk of noncompliance.
What level of customization is available for billing templates and workflows?
Understand the extent to which you can customize billing templates and workflows to match the specific needs of your practice. If you are a mental health practitioner, you might need the capability to customize billing rules based on mental health diagnostic codes.
Methodology
To be considered for this list, products had to:
Have at least 20 unique product reviews published on Software Advice within the past two years, with an average rating of 3.0 or higher (as of Feb. 9, 2024).
Include the core features of medical billing software: claims management, claims scrubbing, and insurance eligibility verification.
Meet our market definition for medical billing software: “Medical billing software is used to manage patient billing and payment collections for the medical industry. Hospitals, clinics, and medical practitioners use these applications to centralize and automate essential processes such as invoicing, claims management, claims scrubbing, insurance eligibility verification, and financial reporting. Medical billing solutions typically support compliance with healthcare regulations.”
For products that met the first three criteria, we assessed the monthly subscription price and found the average price to be $75—we considered only products with publicly available pricing information. Based on our assessment, we then shortlisted products with a monthly subscription price lower than $75 for this article.
*Our research team identified these features from vendor websites (as of Feb. 9, 2024) based on their analysis of what users find valuable in or expect from medical billing software. This list is not exhaustive. For additional features, refer to the vendor's website.
Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Software Advice’s medical billing directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in the Software Advice directory that offer them.
Editorial independence: We select and rank products based on an objective methodology developed by our research team. While some vendors may pay us when they receive web traffic or leads, this has no influence on our methodology.