How to Increase Receivables While Preserving Patient Relationships

Getting Your Staff to Buy In
A crucial component of any bad debt reduction program is the buy-in of your patient-pay receivables team and other organization members that handle point-of-service interaction with incoming patients. To accomplish this important task, you must clearly communicate and demonstrate that your organization will:

• Make patient-pay an organizational priority.
• Improve front-end training to remove any discomfort in asking for payment.
• Set collection goals and reward achievement.
• Enhance screening for government program eligibility.
• Improve financial counseling services by: expanding payment opportunities, providing prompt-pay discounts, setting policies that support some form of upfront payment for elective services, and prioritize back-end collections.

It is only when everyone understands the importance of point-of-service collection and follow-up collections that noticeable improvement will be seen.

Outsource It
Implementing an effective, comprehensive point-of-service collection system is a big job. It's critical to develop a process that is tailored to the needs of your institution, gets the staff buy-in that's necessary and preserves patient relationships. Identifying seasoned accounts receivable management partner to review your practices, one with a proven track record of establishing and managing point-of-service training and collection as well as follow-up collection is an option you should consider.

These firms have the ability to provide your point-of-service and collections teams with expert training and the other tools necessary to improve your collection effectiveness while providing a satisfactory experience for the patients involved.

David Morrisey is Director of Development of KeyBridge Medical Revenue Management, an Ohio-based accounts receivable management firm specializing in the healthcare industry.

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