Small practices lose a lot of money to unpaid claims not being managed properly. And this happens mostly because of poor AR practices such as extending credit without planning, not knowing how to deal with unqualified customers, and failing to follow-up with past-due accounts in a timely manner. While these are some of the major issues, other critical issues include improper application and allocation of the collection management systems. The administrative team of most small practices fail to generate and use reports and as a result end up dealing with other potential issues. These issues trigger a lot of problems that can make recovering outstanding difficult and consequently reduce the profitability of your business. So, it makes perfect business sense to adopt effective strategies to streamline AR recovery services and make your revenue cycle management services highly effective.
Best Ways to Make AR Recovery Precise
There are many ways by which small practices can recover AR outstanding on time and in full. However, some of the best practices that they need to incorporate include:
Systematic Evaluation
For a small practice, every unresolved claim requires a closer look. You need to take it through the lens of an expert to spot the error that led to the denial. No matter what the reason is, an expert will have the experience of dealing with a similar denial in the past, and so will help you deal with the issue in a way that will lead to a resolution.
The pivot to systematic evaluation, is to establish a specific schedule for monitoring and assessing the state of accounts receivable. A good practice is to have it done at least once a week. Alongside it is important to create a billing dispute resolution process so that your team precisely knows what to do when a dispute arises.
Read Also Top Benefits of Outsourcing Accounts Receivable Services
Prioritization
While resolving unpaid claims is important, it’s equally important to prioritize them and ensure that they do not lapse before being processed. As it stands for big hospitals, small practices must also prioritize collections based on which payers or debtors owe the most, and which ones are the most delinquent. The fact remains that the more money you recover, the more you can use that as working capital.
Just like big hospitals, it always pays to prioritize unpaid claims with the help of analytical tools. A data-driven, predictive collections prioritization model tells you precisely the accounts that are least or most likely to pay. Further, it helps you stay abreast of the specific payer’s requirements and enable you recover maximum claims amount in return. In short, prioritization will help you get refunded fast.
| Did You Know The biggest mistake in AR is allowing an unpaid account to run for too long. With each passing day, the odds of collecting the full amount owed increases. |
Claim Correction and Resubmission
Irrespective of the size of a practice, claim correction and resubmission is a critical process and so it’s very important to adhere to the claims filing best practices. This helps in eliminating another service denials or other undesirable processing results. A good way is to have a specialized resubmission team.
Some best practice for claim correction and resubmission is to resubmit a claim after 30 days of denial intimation, include ALL services to be considered for payment when submitting a corrected claim, file all services for a specific date of service on the same claim form, avoid marking a claim “corrected” if additional information has been sought, UNLESS there is a need to change the original claim submission etc.
Read Also Best Practices for Medical Accounts Receivable Management
Patient Communication
In case there is outstanding balance from the patient’s end, it’s important to intimate them on time with an easy to comprehend report. Bills sent to patients need to be simple and transparent because patients usually clear all the outstanding if they understand the charges and believe that the it is justified.
Patient communication should be done in all available modes of communication. Send mails, emails and even call them up to intimate them and then follow up. Having a specialized team for communicating with patients can be very helpful for small practices because it helps them connect at a personal level and build relationships.
Report Generation
Small practices must bank on a robust report generation process to effectively deal with the aging of accounts receivable in your business. Integral to the process are steps such as sending automatic reminders to patients who owe you money, accept online payments from patients, and offer discounts to customers who pay early.
A proper report will help you keep track of when an invoice is due, keep a tab of the total number of invoices due, generate AR aging reports weekly, monthly, or quarterly, identify and analyze cash flow problems as and when they arise, identify chronic defaulters and necessary action and estimate the amount of debts that will go uncollected.
Why Choose an AR Recovery Provider
As a small practice, you need to choose an AR recovery provider solely because they help you save time and money and free you up to focus on your core practice. As a small practice can you afford to deal with deal with old AR recovery services with limited staff. But when you delegate it to an AR recovery provider you can leverage their well-defined procedures to collect payments timely and appropriately, leave collection prioritization to a competent medical business, achieve the desired level of efficiency in collecting payments, and safeguard patient data with advanced data safeguard technologies.
Collection success rate with an AR recovery provider:
What to Look for in an AR Recovery Provider
If you go by the rule book there are many things that need to be considered while choosing a AR recovery provider. A few common things are experience, client testimonials, expertise and so on. We believe it’s all about expertise. Look for it straight away to get the best results.
Expertise stands for strategy determination and preparation of procedures. Here are some of the strategy determination you must look for in a provider:
- What is the process or criteria by which they bring patients into the defaulters criteria?
- The norms and circumstances of acceptance of a patient as a defaulter
- Kind of patients who are not acceptable and the exit process
And when it comes to preparation of procedures look for the following:
- The types of invoicing methods of deployed
- Type of reminders sent to patients. Is it only done verbally or in writing?
- The gist of the reminder? How different is one reminder from the other
- When to initiate legal proceedings
How do you determine the AR process? When do you actually delegate it to a collection agency?
While AR follow-ups are critical to revenue cycle management services, there are several other essential processes that need to be addressed first. Some of these processes include charge entry, verification and payment posting etc. During the course of these processes, the exact diagnostic and procedural codes are determined by an AR process in medical billing expert.
Who we Are and Why We Are the Experts?
MedbillingExperts has over 2 decades of experience in providing revenue cycle management services to small practices in the US. Over the years we have developed an efficient system of healthcare accounts receivable management process to assist practices in complete and on-time recovery of outstanding payments both from patients and insurance carriers. Driven by a team of highly experienced AR professionals and a robust and flexible process we have assisted healthcare providers leave no money on the table while focusing on their core services.
