6 Effective ways to increase your Patient Collection

Patient collection is very crucial for healthy Cash flow for any practice, patient responsibilities on Medical bills have increased a lot over the last decade. This is partly due to the increase in the number of high-deductible plans and narrowing down of coverages by major insurances. Therefore it’s important to make sure your patient collection process is efficient otherwise you’ll end up losing a huge portion of the revenue.

Let’s talk about the ways you can improve your patient collections.

1. Take Up Front Payment from Patients

The Best way to avoid hussle of chasing patients for payment is to take it upfront. It’s easy in case of Co-payments but could be difficult with Co-insurance & Deductible plans. 

But what you can do is create a cost-estimator spreadsheet where the front desk enters the deductible remaining & co-insurance for the patient and what service is going to be performed and it would give you a close approximation of patient liability based on your contract rate for that insurance.

We can create it for free for you. Submit your query on our Contact Us page and our Billing consultant will help in creating Cost-estimator. They can also help you with any other questions you may have regarding patient collection or any other area of Billing. It’s totally free.

One more layer you can add in Taking up front payments is if your practice sends a reminder via Call/SMS/App about the upcoming appointment you can add the patient responsibility amount in the message this will surely help in increasing the upfront collection & would also prevent lengthy process of sending statements after visit.

2. Inform Patient of what they need to pay

It’s important to have patients informed about what their financial responsibilities would be for the visit and it needs to be explained well by the front-desk staff. Train the staff on verifying insurance coverage, informing about available payment options, collecting patient contacts & Insurance information accurately, Communicating effectively on the overdue accounts. It’s also important that staff always remain respectful and courteous even if they are contacting the same patient multiple times about unpaid bills.

3. Change your Statement Cycle

Statement cycles have traditionally been of 30 days and 4-5 statements then the balance is transferred to collection agencies after 2 calls to patients. By the time you have sent your 5th statement it’s over 90 days and as much you delay the chances of getting paid reduces.

Therefore it’s important to make the statements cycle more efficient, change the statement cycle to 15-20 days, reduce the # of statements to 3. Call the patient before sending 2nd & 3rd statements to confirm their contacts & making them aware of their outstanding bills & if they are facing financial issues offer them installment plans to pay the payments in small installments. Your 3rd statement would be around the 45-50th day and then move it to the collection agency.

4. Switch to E-Statement & Offer online Payment Options

E-statement is a great way to reduce the hussle of paper statements. It's more quick as well as you can keep track of whether it reached the patient or not. There are many applications who provide you E-statement facility and you can add multiple online payment options so patients can make payment with ease at home.

5. Reminder on Appt & Visit

Make it part of the practice policy to inform patients about their previous outstanding at time of confirming appointment and patient check-in. That way if they have any questions about the bills or difficulty in making payment it can be fixed.

6. Easy Payment Plan

Part of the easy payment policy is to provide multiple payment options, offering your frequent followup patients a recurring payment plan & for the patients facing financial crunch you can offer them an installment plan to pay the amount in small installments.

With Increasing patient responsibilities, and patient payments taking a larger portion of your revenues, it’s important to develop strategic policy & processes to improve patient payment collection. Reach out to our Billing consultant team today for free consultation to help you optimize your medical billing.