Patient Payments Blog

Deductibles have reset and patients will be paying your bills out of pocket for the next few months. Do you have a good way to ensure they’ll pay on time?

Topics: Financial Policy, Ideas, change, accounts receivable

Payment plans are becoming a necessity in many healthcare practices. The treatments your patients need are simply too expensive, and their deductibles are too high for them to pay a large balance.

 

In order to collect the full amount of billed services while preventing past due A/R from climbing, payment plans are a good option. To make payment plans successful you’ll have to do a little planning yourself. Below are some simple steps that can help you develop an effective policy. 

Topics: Payments, Financial Policy, practice management, Medical Office Administration

We live in a world of apps and auto bill pay. Want a coffee? Order and pay for it on your app, walk in and it’s waiting for you with no further interaction. Not good at remembering to pay your water bill? Don’t like paper bills and writing checks? Set up an auto-pay and forget it. What about mortgage, car, insurance, cable, Netflix, or a thousand other things? A vast percentage of Americans chose to make all these payments automatically.

Topics: Financial Policy, Payments, invoicing, practice management, Medical Office Administration, Medical Billing, estatements

Human bodies are complex. Human minds are complex. If you are working on either, you will encounter surprises. The unexpected is the norm. As hard as you try to provide pricing your patients can understand, there are always variables. Complications, new discoveries from the lab or the exam, additional and unanticipated materials were needed, or a hundred other potential issues can arise. These tend to fight against pricing transparency.

Topics: Pricing Transparency, Fees, Financial Policy

Do you know your patient’s deductibles and how much they’ve paid toward them before you treat them? If not, you may be missing the most important key to determining if they will pay your bill.

Topics: High Deductible Challenge, Deductibles, Financial Policy, Medical Office Administration, Patient Payment Policies, medical practice management

I’m seeing more and more encouragement, no, insistence that doctors are going to have to get into the loan business. I’ve read two articles in the past two weeks that specifically target the need for doctors to finance patient payments. Many others allude to the need. Some of them are as simple as creating payment plans all the way to actually financing the care with a loan contract. One product site I ran across says straight up – ‘Hospitals are now Banks, too.’

Topics: Financial Policy, Payments, Past Due, HDHP, Loans

Join us at HIMSS18 for a fireside chat! Dave Crooks, president of Easy Pay Solutions, will be speaking at BOOTH # 3610 in conjunction with our partner Aprima! 

Topics: Benefits, Financial Policy, Payments, Past Due, HDHP, practice management, Medical Office Administration, Medical Billers

Past due patients are hard to reach. Once you do you must make the best of the call. If you have a card-on-file system, you have the power to take control of the collections process in a patient friendly way. We have developed simple questions (scripts) to help you maximize every contact with past due patients. Download the PDF by clicking on the graphic. The link will take you to the download page. 

 

Topics: Financial Policy, Scripts, Back Office Tips, accounts receivable, Payments, healthcare payments, Patient Balances, Credit Card On File

 According to a Trans Union study reported on by Becker’s Healthcare, which you can find here, the generation fondly referred to as the millennials are the slowest paying generation now paying its own bills. There are other generations not included in the study, but they are either old enough to be under Medicare or young enough to have their parents paying their bills.

Topics: Little Know Facts, Financial Policy, Payments

 In the complex world of healthcare, fee publishing is a tricky business. You don’t want to give your patients the wrong impression by publishing fees that may not apply to their situation. If publishing fees will lead to patient confusion, it may be best not to. But for most practices, publishing a list of your most common fees can be very helpful and a great way to build patient trust.

Topics: Financial Policy, Patient Payment Policies, Patient Payment Solutions, Pricing, Pricing Transparency, Fees