A recent report CNNMoney report states that physicians in the U.S. have started selling their private practices to big hospitals because of rising business costs and falling reimbursements from insurance companies.
For the last five years, more than 30% to 40% of physicians have sold their practices and become full time employees in hospitals. Many physicians are complaining that they are fed up with administrative work such as collecting patient payments and filing insurance claims that is consuming the time that they want to spend on patient care.
If you are worrying about your practice getting low on revenue that might be due to non-retrieval of payments from your patients, which now turning out to be one of the major problems affecting medical practices. Your revenues will be badly affected when you write off patient balances for variety of reasons:
- It can happen that patients don’t pay their bills, ignore them or sometimes they try to compromise for a reduced bill amount. However, government rules do not permit providing discounts in patient deductibles, which can be considered as insurance fraud. If there are large patient balances on your A/R report, you can send them for collection or try to write them off. Both of these options will badly affect your practice.
- Another situation leading to patient dues is when your front office staff did not gather information on patient coinsurance, deductible or co-pay in advance like they were supposed to do so. For instance, when insurance verification was performed, they could have reported that the patient had 40 dollar co-pay when it is really 60 dollar co-pay. Also, the insurance coverage of the patient might have been terminated before the patient’s visit to your practice or before the claims were sent. Also, if the patient has no insurance and you are seeing him/her on a cash basis, not collecting payments in advance will impact your revenue badly.
Partnering with a medical billing company can be the solution to most of these issues. A reliable service provider will provide a full suite of medical billing services and medical billing collections so that you don’t have to worry about these activities. With the right partnership, you can focus on your core activities while saving as much as 30-40% on your operational costs.
Rajeev Rajagopal, the President of OSI, has a wealth of experience as a healthcare business consultant in the United States. He has a keen understanding of current medical billing and coding standards.