Physicians Practice - April 2008 - (Page 58)

BILLING & COLLECTIONS started getting paid. “If you follow your policy, if you stick to the fact that if you don’t pay me I’m going to send you to collections, that is as effective as using late charges or interest and you don’t run as big a risk of upsetting patients.” Capko agrees. Charging interest “is a very touchy area. I really discourage it. It’s easier just to make sure you are collecting right.” Her tips for tightening up: • Don’t offer credit — If a patient does owe you money, try to have him put his balance on a credit card or use a credit agency such as CareCredit that extends credit lines to patients. You get paid in full, and the patient can work out his troubles with someone else. Patients need to pay down credit cards to keep the card and avoid ruining their credit altogether. “I don’t think the loyalty to a physician is as strong as loyalty to a credit card,” suggests Jeffrey Hausfeld, a physician and managing director for FMS Financial Solutions. • Use your team — The best time to needs to change,” says Capko. “Let’s say you have a patient who didn’t pay you and now has gotten two statements. They come into the doctor and no one says anything.” That just tells the patient you aren’t serious, Capko points out. “We do have to wire down how we are going to comply with our own CHARGING INTEREST? Of course, no matter how diligent you are, some patients are not going to pay. Even then, think twice about charging interest. “Physicians cannot act as lending institutions. Otherwise, you are like a bank. You aren’t licensed to be a bank,” warns Hausfeld. “If you follow your policy, if you stick to the fact that if you don’t pay me I’m going to send you to collections, that is as effective as using late charges or interest and you don’t run as big a risk of upsetting patients.” GET TOUGH Gregory Mertz, consultant collect is always when the patient is in the ofﬁce, but it doesn’t often happen. “We’ve gotten really good at training the front ofﬁce staff to not hold patients accountable for anything but their copay and that policy.” Consider the front desk an extension of the billing ofﬁce. Make sure the front line can see when patients have deductibles, coinsurance, or unpaid balances and that they know what to do about it. • Act fast — “If patients don’t respond READ MORE ABOUT IT! Visit this story on PhysiciansPractice.com for additional tools to help you collect from patients painlessly: to the ﬁrst statement, they are telling you it’s not important,” Capko points out. Don’t keep sending statements. “It’s very easy to ignore something that comes in the mail. Try picking up the phone.” Staff can simply say they are calling to help the patient work out a payment method. In general, take a hard look at your policies for collecting from patients and a hard look at whether anyone actually follows them. “If you have a lot of patients [you’d consider charging interest], something else is wrong,” suggests Todd Welter, who often reviews billing departments from his Denver-based consulting ﬁrm. Find out what’s broken in your house before you go hard after patients. You set the tone that patients follow. • Type “Patients, Pay Up!” in our Search Articles box to find out what you should include in your patient financial policy to avoid trouble later on. If you assess an interest fee, you must comply with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act as well as state truth-in-lending regulations, an onerous task. Hausfeld has seen many practices get in trouble for violations. In one instance, a staff member called a patient’s workplace and left a message saying, “This is Dr. So-and-So’s ofﬁce calling about a delinquent account.” “There are a lot of people out there who are professionals at not paying their bills. The patient went after this physician’s ofﬁce,” Hausfeld recounts. “They threatened to sue, and the doctor ended up writing off a $3,000 account because he knew he was wrong.” A simpler option: Charge a ﬂat fee on all late accounts. TRY A LATE FEE • Go to our Tools section and download our three sample collection letters. • Type “Front Desk as Profit Center” in our Search Articles box to learn more about using your front desk staff to improve collections. “Most practices elect to charge a late charge. That’s a whole lot cleaner,” says Mertz. A flat fee “very often works out to be more anyway. A $20 reprocessing fee on a balance of $200 is 10 percent. That’s probably loan shark-type interest,” Welter says. WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM 58 | PHYSICIANS PRACTICE | APRIL 2008 http://PhysiciansPractice.com http://WWW.PHYSICIANSPRACTICE.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Physicians Practice - April 2008

Physicians Practice - April 2008 Contents The Bigger Picture: Medicare Decision Time Letters Physicians Practice Pearls: Outsource Your Pain Noteworthy Cover Story: Trial Lawyers Tell All Management: When It’s Time to Change Ask the Experts Technology: Do You Know Where Your Data Is? The Tech Doctor: Are Your Discarded PCs Really Clean? Billing & Collections: Playing Hardball The Administrator's Desk: Recruiting for Patient Satisfaction Start It Up: Finance - Mastering the Numbers Game Coding The Great Practice Makeover: Taking Care of Business Associates Classifieds Advertiser Index

Physicians Practice - April 2008

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