Patient Payments Blog

The reasons your practice needs to begin taking online payments keep growing. More and more of your patients are accessing bill pay options online. Waiting to make online payments available to them will be seen as a failure to meet their expectations.

Topics: Financial Policy, Patient Experience, Retail Healthcare

Without being rude, a patient needs to be reminded that he or she will most likely owe your practice money. This needs to be clearly stated at the beginning of your relationship. With existing patients, at the beginning point of his or her next treatment.

 

Not only is this reminder the most important part of your financial policy; it is the most difficult to communicate in a non-confrontational way.

Topics: Patient Payments, Patient Payment Policies, Financial Policy

As if your job was not hard enough, there are organizations, writers, and public service companies out there that are constantly telling patients not to pay their bills. They might argue that they are only trying to help patients pay the correct amount. But human nature tells me that when people read articles that give them a way to delay or get out of paying something they don’t want to pay - they will take it.

Topics: Patient Billing Compliance, Past Due, Payments, Financial Policy

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: accounts receivable, change, Ideas, Financial Policy

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

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: Medical Office Administration, practice management, Medical Billing, invoicing, Payments, Financial Policy, 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: Financial Policy, Pricing Transparency, Fees

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

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