50% of Americans struggle with medical bills or debt.
But your healthcare practice doesn’t have to.
Healthcare practices struggle to collect missed medical payments at one point or another, just as any other business. Though the loss may vary, failure to recover the money can significantly impact your revenue.
Healthcare practices should follow a fair but aggressive means to recover outstanding payments. But not at the expense of affecting their relationship with patients!
So what should you do to collect missed medical payments without damaging your reputation among patients?
Thinking of outsourcing the outstanding payments 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. Money-minded and overly aggressive collection agencies may use some methods that can degrade your reputation and damage your relationship with your patients.
Since healthcare practices significantly depend on returning patients, you can’t afford to lose them to debt collection agencies.
Why are traditional debt collection methods not relevant to your healthcare office anymore?
An impolite approach
Third-party healthcare collection agencies can follow a heavy-handed approach, like constantly calling your patients to annoy, embarrass, harass, or abuse them. These out-of-control practices are not healthy for your reputation. You may even lose your patients since the collection agency represents your business.
Expensive
The agencies can charge anywhere between 20% and 50% of your collections, depending on how old the outstanding medical payments are and how much debt is to be collected.
Isn’t it quite an amount? Besides, it also comes with the risk of sabotaging your reputation!
Account prioritization
The debt collection agencies consider different factors in prioritizing debt accounts. Your healthcare practice may need to recover missing medical payments at the earliest to keep you in the business, but perhaps you are not even on their list.
Patients can develop hard feelings
Your patients may want to pay for the treatments taken, but they can’t do it due to an emergency situation. What do you do? Give the responsibility of such a sensitive matter to some third-party debt collection agency, only to embarrass patients and lose them forever?
The last thing you will want is to be associated with an agency that may bully your patients or do something worse, push legal boundaries.
So what’s a better way to collect missing healthcare payments while maintaining your patients’ trust?
Why not consider using a debt collection software system?
Collect the owed amount faster with increased efficiency and profitability by using an automated system while maintaining good relationships with your patients.
The best thing is – a system never sleeps, forgets, or calls in sick!
- A system can manage your entire healthcare debt collection process when you are busy offering treatments and care.
- It ensures excellent coverage and higher connect rates, thus improving operations efficiency.
- You are always the number one priority for the system
No more embarrassing patients
There is no human involvement during the collection process, which means no pressure and embarrassment for the patient to pay the debt. Receiving a courtesy payment reminder with flexible payment options might assist your patients in paying the outstanding balance based on their financial situation and ability to pay.
Avoid patient confrontation
When patients don’t have someone to confront them about the debt, they can think calmly and analyze the outstanding payment they owe to your practice. Cooler heads bring positive responses. The patients will want to pay as long as they are reminded about dues subtly.
Removes the need for haggling
There are few to no chances of negotiation when the system sends a documented invoice. With flexible options to pay the outstanding healthcare payments, patients agree gradually, helping recover debts without affecting the business-patient relationship.
Denefits AR – Making debt recovery efficient, easy, and patient-centric
Denefits AR is simple and efficient. It focuses on minimizing the Days Sales Outstanding or DSO alongside the processing costs while maintaining healthy relationships with your patients.
Besides, there‘s no additional fee for your healthcare practice to use this feature, and you can easily track payments made by your patients.
If that sounds incredible, wait for more!
When your patients receive the invoice, they get the option to start a payment plan to pay off the debt in installments or all at once.
It takes 30 seconds or less to send an invoice to your patients. They will receive a payment link by text or email with the invoice.
Your patients can check the details from the comfort of their couch and clear the outstanding payments from any device. The automated system will continue to send reminders to your patients until they make the payment.
The option of Accounts Receivable will allow you to receive payments without needing to mail or print out the bill, a faster, greener way to collect missing healthcare payments.
To learn more:
Make more time for the things you enjoy!
Denefits will take care of your medical debt collection and patient-provider interactions.
Allow the Denefits automated accounts receivable system to relieve you of the stress of collecting your written-off amount while you focus on assisting and making your patients feel better.
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