What practice can honestly afford to walk away from that amount of revenue? These are the days of decreased reimbursements! If you have any kind of relationship with your referring physicians, discussing and overcoming the issue of collecting a copay should be easy. Medicare Considers It Fraudulent An even bigger reason why you should not waive copays and deductibles is that carriers could consider it fraudulent.
Although Medicare may permit waiving copays in very select circumstances, you should never assume that this will be the case. And with third-party carriers, permission to waive is just about unheard of. Do you really want to represent yourself that way? What about financial hardship circumstances? If you have hardship cases, here are some options that the APTA recommends in an article on waiving copayments :. Where it is not precluded by your payer contracts for example, there may be a clause that says you will never charge that payer any more than you charge another payer , the best way to reduce the burden on these individuals is to charge them less.
Remember though, even after you check your contracts and affiliations, if a person has a copayment, you must attempt to collect it. And notify the patient in advance of every draft being taken out or payment being made. She says that not only has it helped reduce bad debt, but also that patients have welcomed the convenience of not having to pay their bills manually.
Because insurance plans frequently change and credit cards expire, Boichat recommends making sure both are updated or verified as current at least annually as part of the check-in process. A few years prior, Coastal made a number of other changes intended to improve patient satisfaction, which ended up improving collections as well. For example, the practice added a kiosk to the waiting area so that people could check in on their own if there was a line at the front desk.
When patients checked in using the kiosk, the computer would remind them of their balances and give them the option to make a partial payment, she says. Most patients ended up paying off those old balances in full, a pleasant surprise to Boichat. Using tablets for patients to input their own demographic and insurance information can achieve a similar result, Betancourt notes.
Other useful times to remind patients of their balances are when patients call to make appointments and in appointment reminder messages, whether they be via voice, text, or email, she says. But perhaps the most powerful improvements have come with giving patients the ability to pay their bills online. More than 90 percent of patients are satisfied with their primary care physician but many of those patients are postponing or skipping care because of concerns about healthcare costs and medical debt, according to a patient survey commissioned by the Physicians Foundation.
Even for those who have insurance, 62 percent of people having problems with medical bills delayed dental care, 43 percent skipped physician-recommended tests or treatment and 41 percent did not fill a prescription, researchers found. Such delays make it difficult to maintain patient volume, and thereby revenue.
But such decisions could eventually result in higher care costs as well if health issues that could have been prevented or resolved sooner worsen over time because they are not addressed. Collecting payments upfront also increases the likelihood that a patient will return, thereby generating additional revenue and improving wellness.
In addition to increasing POS revenue by 33 percent year-over-year, hospitals that implemented one particular billing system on average generated five times more downstream revenue than the original self-pay purchase. Forty-four percent of patients moved forward with subsequent care versus the industry standard of 30 percent. With the traditional post-care billing model, collecting slowly can impair your financial operations because your coverage of expenses erodes as accounts receivable age.
Have an option for patients to pay online. Offer electronic statements in addition to paper statements. Send an electronic statement to the patient as soon as the patient due amount is known, and include a link to the online payment system.
Ask patients if you can set up credit card on file to process payments up to an approved amount.
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