50% of Americans struggle with medical bills or debt.
Your practice doesn’t have to suffer because of that.
Healthcare facilities are likely to face the brunt of missed payments at one point or another, just like any business. Though the loss may vary, failure to recover the lost money can significantly impact your revenue.
Healthcare practices should follow a fair but aggressive way to recover missing payments. But not at the cost of affecting their relationship with patients!
So what should you do to collect outstanding medical payments without damaging your reputation among patients?
Thinking of outsourcing to a debt collection agency?
(WHO MAY NOT HAVE LEGALLY TRAINED EMPLOYEES)
Think again!
While hiring a regular debt collection agency might seem a go-to option, it might not be ideal for your healthcare practice. Overly aggressive and money-minded collection agencies may use some methods that can ruin your reputation and sabotage the relationship with your patients.
As healthcare practices significantly depend on returning patients, you can’t afford to lose them to debt collection agencies.
Why are traditional debt collection practices not relevant to your office anymore?
A heavy-handed approach
Third-party healthcare collection agencies can follow an impolite approach, like constantly calling your patients to annoy, abuse, embarrass, or harass them. Such practices, which are not in your control, are not healthy for your reputation. You may even lose your patients since the agency represents your business.
The cost involved
Depending on how much debt you need help with and how old the missing medical payments are, collection agencies can charge somewhere between 20% to 50% of your collections.
Quite an amount + the risk of degrading your reputation!
Account prioritization
Collection agencies consider various factors while prioritizing debt accounts. Your healthcare practice may need to recover outstanding payments to keep the business afloat, but perhaps your account is not even on their priority list.
Patients can resent your practice
Your patients may be willing to pay for the treatment rendered, but they can’t afford them due to some contingencies. What should you do in such a situation? Hand over the sensitive matter to a third-party collection agency only to harass your patients and lose them forever? This would be the last thing you want – to be associated with an agency that may unnecessarily bully your patients or push legal boundaries.
So what’s a better way to collect missing healthcare payments and win your patients’ trust?
Why not use a debt collection software system?
Using an automated system for healthcare collections can help your practice collect the owed amount faster, increase efficiency, and improve profitability while maintaining good relationships with your patients.
The best thing is – a system never sleeps, forgets, or has bad days!
- A system can handle the entire debt collection process when you’re busy offering care and treatments.
- It improves operations efficiency by ensuring excellent coverage and higher connect rates.
- For the system, you are always the only priority.
No patient embarrassment
No human involvement during the collection process means no embarrassment and pressure to pay the debt. Getting a courtesy payment reminder with flexible healthcare financing options can help your patients pay the outstanding amount according to their circumstances & affordability.
Avoid patient confrontation
With no one to confront about the debt; patients can think calmly and evaluate the outstanding payment they owe to you logically. Cooler heads usually bring positive responses, and patients tend to pay as long as they are reminded consistently & subtly.
Eliminates the need for haggling
When the system sends a documented invoice, there are fewer to no chances of negotiation. As you give flexible healthcare payment plans to pay for the debt, patients agree easily and gradually, your bad debt is recovered without impacting the business-patient relationship.
Denefits AR – Making debt recovery easy, efficient, and patient-centric
Denefits Automated Accounts Receivable is simple and efficient. It focuses on minimizing the DSO – Days Sales Outstanding and processing costs while maintaining healthy relationships with your patients.
There‘s no additional fee for your healthcare practice to use this feature, and you can easily track payments made by your patients.
Sounds great?
There’s more.
Patients receive the invoice, and they can pay all at once or start a healthcare payment plan to afford the outstanding debt. You also get an option to split the transaction fee if you want.
It takes less than 30 seconds to send an invoice to your patients. They will receive a payment link by email or text with the invoice.
Your patients can review the details from the comfort of their homes and make the payment at their convenience from any device. The system will then continue to send reminders until your patient makes the payment. Using the Accounts Receivable option, you won’t have to print or mail out a bill, and you’ll receive your payments – a greener and faster way to collect outstanding healthcare payments.
To learn more:
Free up your time for other important tasks!
Denefits will handle your medical debt collections and patient-provider relationships with care.
Let the Denefits AR system take the burden off your shoulders and collect your written-off amount while you focus on helping your patients feel better.
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