Even if your A/R department is running smoothly right now, it’s important to assess the process from time to time to ensure your cash flow continues to thrive.
We suggest using the following three medical A/R cleanup tips to help your practice collect more payments in less time:
1. Purge Old Data
The first step in cleaning up A/R is to take out the trash.
The amount of outdated patient information housed in your systems can be troublesome. If you haven’t been keeping it up-to-date, it can easily get out of control.
It’s not enough to have your front desk staff collect insurance and contact information from new patients. Try getting your employees at reception to ask patients to validate their personal information and insurance card data at every visit. Then, make the updates in your system immediately.
Once your data collection process is revamped, take a close look at the data you have and identify what you can get rid of. You don’t need to retain the data of patients who have long-ago left your practice. Purge what you can, then move on to new patients.
Have you been waiting for a missed co-pay from a deceased patient or a vaccine reimbursement from a now-out-of-business payer? It might be time to just mark those small balances as losses, rather than allocating staff, money and effort into continually billing for them.
Large balances are a different story, though. It’s always a good idea to…
2. Collect From Recurring Patients
This one may seem obvious, but in many practices, patients with outstanding balances are often let off the hook for payment at the time of visit.
This can allow patients to accumulate balances that grow with every visit. Getting your A/R in tiptop shape requires that you collect existing balances on the date of service and eliminate them from your to-do list.
Your front desk attendants are the first employees patients encounter and your best allies in collecting. Give them the tools they need to procure payment on the day of a patient’s visit.
Follow this simple plan:
- Post a clear and understandable payment policy in your reception area.
- Develop a system in which your front desk staff checks the next day’s appointments for existing balances before making reminder calls or sending confirmation emails.
- In those communications, inform patients with outstanding balances that they will be expected to relinquish payment as soon as they arrive.
- When the patient arrives, staff should be polite yet uncompromising about payment requirements and escalate the situation to a billing department rep or manager if the patient refuses to pay.
3. Run Reports on Collections Trends
So you’ve discarded any unnecessary data and recuperated what you were owed. Now, you’re ready to do some proper reporting.
“Failure to analyze collection performance can be a major headache,” writes Judy Capko of Physicians Practice. “Too often the staff is focused on getting the billing off their desks and the claims submitted, but have little time to follow up on receivables, analyze the practice’s financial performance, and improve collections.”
To monitor A/R effectiveness, it’s important to perform upkeep on your collections process by using the analytics provided by your practice management system. Proper reporting identifies areas of weakness in your revenue cycle.
Are you performing exceptionally when it comes to patient collections but receiving a high percentage of denials?
Weekly analysis of your collection’s backlog– along with other reports – will clarify problematic payer tendencies. Once you know what areas to address, you can give appropriate attention to perfecting your money stream.
Not to mention, continued monitoring is the only way to ensure you keep things orderly in accounts receivable.
