In the alphabet soup of medical billing abbreviations, MSOs are multi-specialty offices. If your practice is a specialty – say, physical therapy – working within a group of providers who offer specialties different from your own, then you’re probably part of an MSO.

In many MSOs, the organization has a central team that tries to handle the paperwork and administration for your practice as well as all the other doctors in your organization. Think of the central team as the ringmaster of a chaotic, medically-themed circus. Yeah, things just got weird. But stay with us for a minute…

You know how challenging it can be to try to bill through an MSO because it’s next to impossible for one billing team to be expert in a variety of specialties. It’s pretty easy to get coding for diagnostic procedures mixed up with coding for treatments, and then things get even weirder: claim submissions get rejected, appeals get more rejection, and so on.