P atients’ insurance programs have witnessed the most significant transformation in the last decade. Deductibles are higher than ever, and new copay structures have been designed leading to increased out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare consumers. With growing patient responsibilities, patient payments become a significant part of revenue cycle management, contributing to a larger percentage of the practice’s revenue.

A Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) report reveals that $1 of every $4 needs to be collected from patients, still patient payment collection has become challenging with over 30% of patients not making the payments upfront. This would in turn, impact the Accounts Receivables (A/R) and ultimately the revenues and cash flow of medical practice. Our medical billing experts recommend 8 steps to boost payment collections and elevate your revenue cycle performance. Dive in.

1. Determine Eligibility

Insurance Eligibility Verification before patient’s appointment is one of the crucial steps in healthcare revenue cycle management. However, manual methods of insurance verification is an extensive process that costs an average of at least $6.83 per verification. Medical billing and coding companies leverage cutting-edge electronic verification tools to process multitude volumes of patient insurance data within seconds to save practices an hour approximately for every 30 patients checked.

2. Communicate cost of service

Communicate to the patients on expected due balance before they visit for their appointments and restate this during their time of visit. This will help patients come prepared for the expenses and increase the chances of paying upfront.

3. Define financial policies

Include a document of carefully curated financial policies and share it with your patients during their visit. This ensures that patients are given a heads up—while helping the practice staff address patient queries if any.

4. Collect at time of service

Collecting patient payments upfront saves a lot of time and efforts of the office staff. Also, payment collection at the time of service increases the likelihood of getting paid.

5. Lower barriers to payment

Make the payment process seamless and easy. For instance, you can provide several payment options for improved convenience, like—cash, check, credit and debit cards, health savings cards to improve the percentage of patient payment collection. Get a card swipe reader to quickly process your debit and credit card transactions without a hitch. Medical billing software solutions also provide credit card processing tools that can be utilized to accelerate financial payments.

6. Institute payment plans

Provide flexible financial plans to help ease the burden of patient payments. For instance, offering installment options to spread the payment over several months can reduce patients’ financial barriers—increasing the likelihood of getting paid.

7. Transition to e-statements

Leverage the capabilities of electronic payment collection solutions to improve the flexibility and convenience of letting patients pay anytime, anywhere, from the comfort of their homes. This helps in prompt collections—while reducing staff time and costs of manual printing and postage invoice expenses.

8. Offer automated recurring payment

Automated recurring payment programs for frequent visitors make the billing and payment processes a breeze for both patients and the staff.

With increasing patient responsibilities, and patient payments becoming a significant part of your revenues, it is critical that you develop strategic processes and goals to improve patient payment collection in your practice. To learn more on optimizing your medical billing process, talk to our team.