How to Recover Dues from Patients to Streamline your Accounts Receivables

Once a patient leaves a medical office without paying, there is a 30% chance they will never meet their responsibility. To recover these funds, practices must spend significant resources. This fact has led many providers to feel chasing these patients is unprofitable. 

However, growing patient responsibility makes this mindset untenable. As Payers burden consumers with higher responsibilities through high deductible health plans, more will leave the office without paying. So, practices must learn how to consistently recoup funds from this demographic.

Here’s how to recover from your patients to streamline your Accounts Receivables. 

Encourage Early Payments

Tracking accounts receivables is a time-consuming, expensive process. So, try to reduce the number of accounts your staff needs to track. During the scheduling process, be clear about payment options and patient responsibility. 

In 2017, the Academy of Healthcare Revenue studied financial healthcare trends. The organization observed that providers receive reimbursements 70% of the time they request it at the point of service. Consistently encourage patients to pay immediately before or following services. Primarily receiving early compensation simplifies the follow-up process for your recovery team. 

Track AR

Label your accounts receivables by age to determine the significance of each charge. Contact consumers as necessary to learn their payment status. Repeat patients may have overdue bills. So, knowing account details is critical to addressing these bills on subsequent visits.

When waiting for insurance payments, wait for a fixed time period before contacting the Payer. How long you wait will be dependent on the type of service and Payer. Ask for clarification if a Payer Rep expresses concerns with your submission. The sooner you receive specific information about the claim, the sooner you can accurately resubmit. 

Maintain Staff Standards

Having to resubmit claims is a poor use of time. Instead, instill your staff with well-defined standards to weed out errors before submission. Conduct internal audits to discover discrepancies in billing processes. 

Track what error types you commonly receive. Since insurance payers have unique standards, note which Payer is associated with each error. Your team may need to contact a payer supervisor to iron out conflicting information. 

Employ Medical Billing Technology

Claim Scrubbing technology can promote more accurate submissions. These systems scan a claim and notify the user of any errors. From here, billing staff can rework the claim as needed. Practices avoid late resubmissions by gaining this knowledge earlier in the billing timeline. 

Hire a Professional Billing Company

Practices benefit most by spending their limited time on patient treatment. By focusing on improving medical outcomes, healthcare providers help all parties. Providers can feel satisfied knowing they’ve boosted their patients’ quality of life as well as their practice's finances.

Plutus Health allows practices to focus on patients. Our billing team efficiently submits claims and follows up where appropriate. We save time while getting the highest reimbursement possible from patients with our technology - AnodynePay. Contact us today to learn about our improvement plan for your patient billing process. 

Key Takeaways

1. Encourage out-of-pocket payments at the point of service. 

2. Track AR by due date and follow up at regular intervals. 

3. Instill consistent coding and billing standards in your staff. 

4. Adopt new technologies that scan claim submissions for errors. 

5. Hire a professional billing company that has smart solutions to handle Patient payments.