Is Your Collection Rate Unhealthy?

Many clinical and non-clinical departments of the medical practices overlook the payment collection from the scratch and most of the times you may combat for the collectibles at the eleventh hour. If it is so, you have some useful stuff here, to hone your collection strategies.

Small mistakes cost you more…

Collecting your hard earned money shouldn’t an end term activity. The collections of physicians, pathology or radiology labs, pharmacies, if unattended on-the-dot, your Accounts Receivable (ARs) would become unmanageable leading to piled-up bad-debts. Thus, point of service (POS) payment is very crucial for a robust healthcare business.

Notably, most physicians want to stay away from the financial dealings and deem that time involved in the finance management could be utilized for patient care and updating the clinical knowledge. But finally, you may land up in big troubles like unmet payroll, unrewarded hard work, dwindled profits or increased bad-debts.

Take care of your funds with these collection tips:

#1 – Ignorance of co-pays

Physicians need to be more attentive and understand that co-pay collection from the patient must be a demand instead of being a patient’s choice. As per the insurance payer contract, the doctor must collect the co-pay from the patient in each visit.

 #2 – Bill Generation for Co-pays

Another common co-pay collection mistake is that you may bill the patient’s co-pay which once more goes against the payer contract policy. Missing the POS collection calls for unnecessary addition of the administrative cost in bill generation, follow-up and collection.

 #3 – Information Deficiency

It is the highly frequent yet imperative issue due to the negligence of the front-end staffs. Important patient’s information like date of birth, insurance carrier and policy details, scanned copy of insurance cards, exact billing address, contact number and many demographic data, if left out at the patient check-in, eligibility issues may arise and hamper your reimbursements.

 #4 – Lack of Payment Pattern Discussion

Mailing the bills directly to the patient and upon patient’s rejection seeking the help of the collection agency may help you, of sure. But, conversing with the patient up on encounter, to make payment arrangement is a much better option to collect your dues.

 #5 – Missing Further Step

When your collection methods are not working out, you need to proceed further either through collection agency or legal proceedings. Of note, this is the point at which doctor-patient relationship may get broken. If the aforesaid 4 steps are followed impeccably, you won’t find any lapse in the serene patient care.