6 Ways to Improve Patient Payment Collections

Working to improve patient payment collections is equally important as increasing insurance collections by having a mindful team of Expert Medical Billers on your side. Improving patient collections at healthcare practices has a significant impact on practice profitability. However, some physicians ignore the fact that they must realign their office workflow to achieve maximum payment collections from insurances and patients. In Medical Billing and Collections Process patient payment collection is the first step to start working with office workflow. It starts from scheduling a patient appointment, identifies their co-pay, co-insurance, and out-of-pocket maximum, and collect the payment upfront.

Some practices have different goals in terms of achieving the highest revenue and it differs from practices to specialties as well as the vision of the healthcare practice owner. Here are the key points to make which can help you to be more successful and profitable in your healthcare practice business.

Insurance Benefits Verification at the Time of Appointment

As soon as the patient calls to schedule the appointment, you should have the ability to check the patient’s eligibility and have this in the documentation. You must know the patient’s plan limitations, copay, coinsurance, deductible, out-of-pocket maximum, and in case of a specialist, the specialist copay as well.

Taking Patient Payment at Front-Desk

Most Practice Management Software can allow healthcare provider staff to check patient eligibility on run-time. If you do not use the industry-standardized Healthcare Practice Management System, you can look at the patient’s insurance card to get the information about copay, coinsurance, deductible, and other plan level details along with eligibility effective and termination date.

Offering the Different Payment Processing Solutions

When we talk about payment processing, we think everyone would be comfortable with Credit Card but that is not true. Some patients prefer to go by Credit Card or Debit Card and in some cases, they would like to use the paper check. Even in some cases, they directly want to go on a patient payment plan to pay in the installments. You need to ensure that your Practice Management System and overall Healthcare Management Workflow have the ability to accept different payment sources.

Improved Patient Payment Collection Procedure

Having a well-defined patient payment collection procedure in place helps you in improving patient collections, and to avoid unnecessary follow-ups, sending too early or too late statements, or relying on manual follow-up. That is the reason that in healthcare business process automation is becoming the booming business market. Your Medical Billing Services Provider should have the ability to send frequent paper statements, e-statements, reminder text messages, and automated IVR Calls for the balance due to ensure the maximum collection.

Review Patient Payment A/R Reports

To work on improving patient collections ou must generate systematic reports to look at the pending account receivable reports on patients’ end and see how long they have been pending. Have a Top Ranked Medical Billing Company by your side to help you provide dynamic reports. It will help you to view the different KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to make further decisions about outstanding balances.

Patient Payment Final Settlement:

As a healthcare provider, you can offer your patients a lump sum amount as a final settlement for their all due balances to clear the pending bills. This strategy helps the healthcare providers to improve patient collections from the bad debt instead of writing this off completely. You need to consider this option before writing off the patient old outstanding balances.

Hire a Professional Medical Billing Company

We deeply understand that healthcare providers are trained for years to provide the best care to their patients and they should not be engaged in the medical billing and collections process to ruin their potential. You should look for a Top Rated Medical Billing Company that can help you to improve your payment collection.

Medical Billing Services Help Available

We at iCareBilling helping many healthcare providers to improve their overall collections. We help the healthcare practices to improve their current workflow to achieve the highest insurance & patient payment collection. Contact us today and talk to Medical Billing Specialist to help you find a Medical Billing Solution for your practice.