Encouraging and initiating communication with patients can go a long way to receiving payment for your medical services. This reduces the great expense and effort associated with sending medical bills to collections. There's another major way to reform revenue cycles in ways that are more practical and can help you rake in more money with a lot less hard work.
Re-inventing the Medical Bill: Explain Monetary Amounts Clearly
One of the major reasons that are cited by those who refuse to pay medical bills is that they just don't make sense. A medical bill is often not sufficiently itemized, and even when it does have line items, the descriptions in those lines may be too technical for a public audience. Dollar amounts may not be clearly tied to a specific procedure or other health care service. This can have a major impact on whether a patient decides to pay the money, or whether both parties suffer when the bill gets kicked around in collections.
Coordinate Patient Statements with Explanation of Benefits (EOB)
Often, the very first form of medical billing that the patient sees is an EOB or explanation of benefits form. As it clearly states on most EOBs, the explanation of benefits is not a bill. This detail is overlooked by a majority of patients though. It often doesn't describe the key information that patients are looking for on a bill, again, in the form of well documented line items. The health insurance company has no incentive to provide this information but you do. Many proactive offices are realizing that it's not necessary to wait until well after the patient gets an EOB to start educating the patient that he or she may need to pay. Sending "pro forma" bills with helpful information about charges can get patients thinking about financial responsibility before they get the verdict from the insurer, and it can also help them understand what they or anybody else is paying for. To many patients and consumer advocates, there's an appalling lack of information getting sent to patients who are being asked to shell out for expensive medical services and relatively little in the way of payment options to help make these payments realistic.
Other strategies for re-inventing medical bills include helpful color coding or other visuals. The drab forms that patients often receive are just not very user-friendly. They don't state the situation clearly or put the context of the medical bill in clear terms. This is something you can proactively revise that might really improve your revenue collections over time.
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