Recover Patient Collections at Your Practice Today!

In today's slacking economy, getting patients to pay in a timely manner can be very stressful for the practices. Moreover, the less-than-ideal collection rates from patients doesn't do any good to encourage the practices. Hence it is essential to ensure that the practices employ certain methods like prepayment options to recover patient collectibles in their practice. Also it is important for the physicians to track the money coming in and the money going out of the practice to optimize patient collections..

Technological advancements in patient collectibles prepare patients for prepayment

Technology allows practices to offer prepayment services to patients. But whether such technology can be effectively utilized to help a practice collect payments at the time of service is the question of concern. Also, the patients reaction on actually paying earlier rather than later should also be considered.

If there is a good incentive in place, it is possible to get prepayment from the patients.

Although it is difficult to get money from people upfront, some of the strategies can surely help your practice recover money from the patients. Let us discuss some of the strategies here:

• Base the charges on the estimated cost of the medical services
• Give different options of prepayment to the patients ? Give more discount when patients agree to pay the complete estimated bill in advance
• Inform the patients about benefits of prepayment options ? shedule their meeting with your financial counselor if possible
• Make sure that the front-desk informs the patients about prepayment option beforehand so that they come to your office fully informed

Practices have seen a lot of success with people paying in advance when they get that discount

Benefits of employing prepayment strategies:

• Practices have seen around 124% increase in their overall collections since it started offering 20% adjusted discount on the bill when payed in full at the time of service
• Practices have succeeded in reducing the overall patient collection costs by 65% by implementing the above strategies

Tracking patient collectibles at your practice

There are certain circumstances where physicians can lose quite a sum of their hard earned money. For example, a slight mistake of your most trusted front-desk person, and some of the cash that should have been deposited to your bank account gets misplaced somewhere. This, with many such carelessness in tracking your financial flow can put a serious plow on your financial health.

Some tips to improve your financial health:

• A spreadsheet bearing patient name, details of cashflow, amount paid by patient, and the date should me maintained by the front-office staff.
• The front-desk person should write down every single payment on the spreadsheet to ensure all the payment due gets collected from the patient.
• Money borrowed by an employee for lunch, office supplies, etc., should also be recorded and tracked accordingly.
• The front-desk person should keep track of the money collected in the cashbox everyday and hand over the money to the practice administrator. This amount should be deposited in the bank with a deposit slip showing this same amount.
• The money in and money out should be recorded and tallied at the end of the day. This record should get approved on weekly basis by the practice administrator to ensure that the entire cashflow is balanced.

With the economy the way it is, it is necessary for the physicians to ensure that their practice keeps track of the patient collectibles to ensure the financial health of their practice. Moreover, it is also beneficial to offer prepayment option to the patients to enhance the financial health of their practice. Patients generally don’t look at a doctor’s office as an actual business; hence it is important for the physician to take the patient collections seriously to manage the cashflow in their practice.

Medicalbillersandcoders.com has been successfully providing medical billing services for over a decade now across all 50 US States. With a vast array of services available with MBC, our clients can easily concentrate on patient collectibles and optimize their revenue. Our clients rely on us for optimized billing services and well informed decisions, so that they can concentrate on improved communication at their practice and stay fully committed to their profession.

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Published By - Medical Billers and Coders
Published Date - Oct-30-2013 Back