How To Prevent Late Patient Payments

Pursuing and preventing late patient payments is challenging when you don’t have the right accounts receivable management or revenue cycle maintenance procedures to support your health system. A well-structured approach to medical billing and collection efforts helps your facility recover lost revenue quickly and efficiently. When you can track unpaid claims effectively, it becomes easier to identify potential issues in your medical billing services and remediate them with high-quality revenue cycle management solutions.

Keep reading to learn how to prevent late payments and promote a positive patient experience.

Why Do You Need an Effective Patient Collections Process?

You need a solid collection and payment experience if you want consistent patient reimbursement. When patients feel confident in your medical billing and collection process, it’s easier to encourage them to engage with your staff and pay their bills on time. Convoluted or out-of-date payment options frustrate patients, a feeling that intensifies if your team doesn’t have the training to educate patients on their responsibilities and guide them toward reimbursement.

Working with patients from the moment you meet them can make all the difference in your revenue cycle. Your staff is responsible for guiding the patient through your health system, from pre-service and treatment to payment. Every aspect of your medical system is vital to your patient collections process, even when they don’t feel directly related. By focusing on the patient experience, you can build and provide financial solutions and scheduling options that align with your patients’ needs and eliminate obstacles to repayment.

Positive cash flow depends on your coding and billing processes. Horizon Healthcare RCM elevates your medical practice with advanced technology and an experienced team of billers and coders. We highlight a path to patient payment.

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How To Get Patients to Pay Their Bills

You should build your health system around your patients. That means implementing technology and processes that make it simple for patients to pay for treatment. You’re responsible for guiding your patient through your health system. Hiring, training, and assigning staff members to oversee every step of revenue cycle management is a substantial but vital undertaking. You must source flexible and scalable solutions that revitalize all areas of your revenue cycle.

Still trying to figure out where to start? Consider reinforcing these services:

Patient Access and Pre-Service Options

An unoptimized health system distorts the timeline for reimbursement. A sound revenue cycle management strategy reduces rejected claims and prevents denials that restrict your cash flow when unaddressed.

Every aspect of your revenue cycle—from the front end to the mid-cycle and back end—is connected and in conversation with one another. You should capture essential information before patients even enter your health system. Ensuring your staff has the resources to sort out demographic data and determine insurance eligibility establishes a positive example. It sets the later stages of your revenue cycle up for success.

When you apply quality practice management tools to capture key information and gain visibility of patients’ coverage, you optimize the patient payment collection process. You’re better positioned to reduce medical coding delays and prevent inaccurate information collection, untimely billing, late charges, and more.

Offer Flexible Payment Options

The more convenient your payment options are, the more likely a patient will pay their bills on time. You should provide many avenues for reimbursement. At the bare minimum, you should offer to keep patients’ cards on file or offer credit and debit payments through an online patient portal.

You can also implement an early-out program. Early-out services prompt patients to pay their balances through flexible payment options with consistent communication. An early-out team helps patients pay off their accounts proactively, informing them of their responsibilities and offering the opportunity to pay their bills over the phone, online, or through the mail.

Whether you build an in-house team or outsource, effective early-out services include:

Consistent communication with patients to encourage payment
Implementing flexible payment methods for patient accounts
Mailing letters and emails to patients with concise messaging

Assertive A/R Follow Up

Aggressive accounts receivable (A/R) follow-up helps health facilities pursue unpaid accounts and prevent overdue payments from slipping through the cracks. Your coders and billers should understand the latest medical terminologies and have advanced reporting tools to discover trends in your revenue cycle. Identifying key performance indicators makes it easier to build solutions that strengthen your health system.

To set the stage for effective A/R follow-up and secure patient payments more efficiently, gather these reports:

Root cause analysis
Key performance indicators
Accounts receivable aging reports
Liquidation and recovery reports
Reconciliation reports
Patient financial data

Experienced Call Center Representatives

Sometimes simply being there is enough to get patients to pay their bills. Establishing or outsourcing medical call center services is a great way to elevate your patient experience. Skilled callers are available, communicative, and empathetic. They help patients form and navigate payment methods and offer resources to boost their confidence. The ideal call center team aligns with your health system and delivers professionalism that exceeds patient expectations.

Empathetic operators establish meaningful connections with patients. They know how to clarify patient financial responsibilities and can efficiently guide them through your medical billing and collection processes. With a reliable front end, the latter stages of your revenue cycle, including collection, are more likely to proceed smoothly.

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Ensure Effective Patient Collections in Healthcare With Horizon

Securing patient payment requires careful strategy. You need solid revenue cycle management that accounts for every aspect of your health system. Refining your processes and ensuring you have the resources to keep patients informed is challenging when you have a busy schedule.

Horizon Healthcare RCM strengthens your revenue cycle with our high-quality revenue cycle management solutions. Our processes are scalable and customized to suit your requirements. We help you identify, collect, and optimize reimbursement. By overseeing your coverage discovery, denial management, collections, and scheduling efforts, we build you a consistent path to payment. Whether you need a few new resources or want to revise your health system from the ground up, we’re prepared to lend a hand.

Ready to revitalize your health system? Reach out to our experienced billers and coders.

How To Prevent Late Patient Payments

Why Do You Need an Effective Patient Collections Process?

How To Get Patients to Pay Their Bills

Patient Access and Pre-Service Options

Offer Flexible Payment Options

Assertive A/R Follow Up

Experienced Call Center Representatives

Ensure Effective Patient Collections in Healthcare With Horizon

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