Your practice as a whole is involved in your patient collections journey, which begins well before the billing statement. Your medical practice’s financial stability depends on its effectiveness, thus it’s critical to analyse and constantly enhance each phase of the procedure.
Patient collections foundation
Knowing where you stand right now is the first step in assuring the success of any new procedure. To be able to plan ahead, it’s a good idea to develop a list of the tools and procedures you already use for collecting patient payments. This will help you identify exactly the tools and resources you already have. You may discover bottlenecks or gaps in your processes and what modifications to do to get to your ultimate goal of enhanced revenue collections by taking a step back and mapping it out.
Schedule an appointment with the patient
The best moment to collect a patient’s basic information, including name, surname, email address, and medical insurance number, is when they schedule an appointment with your business. Using this data, you may do a “Family Check,” a function of certain practise management systems that verifies membership details for all dependents on a policy, to determine the correctness of the patient records. By doing this, you can be confident that the billing you do uses the most recent, correct patient data. Patients can submit this information on their own when using an online appointment booking platform, which can then be immediately supplied back into your practise management software for simple invoicing. Having accurate billing data upfront will minimise your claim rejection rate later on in the patient collections journey
During the patient consultation
The patient consultation is a step in the patient gathering process that is frequently missed. What you ultimately charge the patient depends on appropriately capturing the diagnosis. As a result, it’s crucial that you collect all of your debts. Making sure that all of the procedures and supplies utilised in a medical consultation are included in your claims is one of the greatest methods to guarantee a steady income stream. For the financial stability of your practise, you must submit complete claims for your services. Consumables are frequently under- or never-claimed, and procedure lines are frequently missing, according to a pilot research by Healthbridge. These issues can significantly affect your bottom line. If for some reason your patient is unable to settle their account at the time of their consultation, here are some measures that you can take to make sure your revenue stream isn’t affected.
Post consultation
Unfortunately, the likelihood that a patient may take longer to pay increases the longer you wait before billing them. According to research by David Evans (21 June 2013; Free Agent), payments for invoices that were delivered within a week of the job being completed took an average of 5 days. However, even a week after the invoice was delivered, the payment period rose to 10 days. If you have a billing system in place that can transmit claims in real time, you’ll be able to find out right away whether or not a patient’s medical insurance will cover a certain expense. Therefore, if you are aware of the patient’s liability before they depart from your office