5 Steps to Increase Patient Collections

Most of the practice owners work hard to understand payer billing and coding guidelines and reimbursement policies. Here are the 5 steps that will help you to increase patient payment collections. It will help you streamline your operational efforts to capture complete reimbursement and achieve patient-payment success.

Step 1: Recognize Patients who Pay

Normally, every patient who is treated is the payer. There are a few who are not financially responsible to pay. So every patient should be communicated openly and sincerely about the financial expectations. This is not a time for complacency in the reimbursement strategy. With the help of the right planning, patients with high deductibles can be identified by medical billing professionals.

Step 2: Recognize Out-of-Pocket Costs

An 89% of patient states that they prefer to know their payment responsibility frankly. 65% of patients are found to be more willing to make a payment if they know the expected expenditure during the health service. To increase patient payment collections, never leave the calculation to change or keep the patient in dark. Increasing the revenue and avoiding the extended collection times, begins with building your knowledge of patient benefits.

Step 3: Create policies for Patient Payment Collections

The revised healthcare plan has led to the burden of patients’ deductibles. In this condition,  patient-payment policies should be of top priority if you want to capture this commonly overlooked revenue stream. Take time to create patient payment collection policies. It could lead to exposing the details of the drops of payment of the inpatients. The flexible payment policies benefit both the patient and healthcare professional practice.

Step 4: Reassess Your KPIs

The best way to increase patient payment collections is to capitalize on the revenue stream to monitor the KPIs (key performance indicators). Be sure to generate reports with the proper parameters to obtain better insights.  Each KPIs provides helpful data for you to measure the success of your patient payment strategy.

Step 5: Provide Online Payment Solutions

The vast majority of patients (about 84%) prefer to pay non-healthcare bills online. This demonstrates an incredible opportunity for practices to capitalize on this already established consumer behavior. There are several ways with which you can reinforce patient-payer relationships through the payment experience. Online payments that are processed at the patient’s convenience, increase patient payment collections probability of the medical bill.

Following the aforesaid 5 steps helps grow patient payment collections for the health service.