Tips and strategies for healthier Account Receivable (AR)

Are you in a billing dilemma? 

Did you outsource your medical billing process, like many others, to an outside vendor with good outcomes, but are still finding that despite your account receivables turning healthier your balance sheet is still skewed.  Most probably you are even on the way to secure your “way-too-many” unsecured credit for the financial year.  But do you ever stop and think why this is the case.

We might have an answer for you here.

It has been estimated that since 2004 the average copay for an insured person (provided by his/her employer) might have gone up by as much as 25%.  This could only mean that the collection of patient balances like deductibles, co-insurance and copays holds equal importance to the fiscal well-being of an organization as the collection of payer reimbursements.  It is true that the medical billing staff in many a clinic might consider copays as not being important to the overall scheme of things, but this is quite far from the truth.

So now that we are pretty sure that copays do play an important role in the revenue management cycle, how do you train your staff for  the collection of the same.  Will the standard non-empathetic “are you going to pay now” work?   More often than not the patient might say “no”, and you can consider that particular copay to be as good as gone.  Staff need to be specially trained in the art of copay extraction, which really is a matter of being decent, polite, and more importantly humane.  Also, it would be a good idea to open any talk about copays with the sentence “will you pay through cash or credit card”.    Rather than leaving it up to the patients to decide, the clinical staff should take the lead.

Download this AR MANAGEMENT SERVICE For HOSPITALS PDF

Another important point to consider would be the timing of the query.  Although it would be ideal to bring this up at the time of the patient calling to schedule an appointment, in practice this may not happen.  So alternatively the next best time is, right when the patient checks in for the appointment.   As discussed above the staff need to prevail, but if found that the patient is financially not in a situation to pay, it would be both empathetic and smart for the clinic to offer them the option of instalments.  Finally the staff needs to be knowledgeable enough to collect more than one copay for a visit if the situation demands (as in the case of a lab test being done at the time of a visit).  Although this might be difficult in the case of a clinic operating on a skeletal staff, after having outsourced most of its medical billing services to a vendor, it would be a good idea here to avail the advice of the vendor for such special instances.