With the Affordable Care Act, the patient portion owed for each visit is growing — overall patient balances are increasing.
You try sending more statements, but that is not getting the results you want or need in terms of patient payments.
You are starting to see more patient write-offs or more patients sent to collections. Both costly options.
We sent out 175 calls (cost less than $25) and received $2961.14 credit card payments plus 17 inquiries and promises to pay. The staff loves the calls — they don’t need to try to reach patients on the phone, instead they focus on taking payments and handling patient questions.
When we sent just statements alone, about 5% of people responded. Now with the Billing Reminder calls, we get a 30% response rate (or 6 times better)! We are seeing much improved patient payments with this higher response rate.
The Billing Reminder Calls allow our staff to focus on collecting money and answering patient questions rather than dialing phones and leaving messages. Now, we simply upload the patient calling list and patients live-transfer to us or simply call us back from messages left. We can easily reach 100% of our patients who have balances every month. I love this system!
Since we started the billing calls, we’ve seen an overall drop of 15% in our Patient A/R Balances. We’ve also cleaned up all our old debt and keep a much better handle on write-offs and sending to collections. In addition, with 1-800 Notify doing 500-600 calls / day, we saved $50,000 / year by not re-filling a staff position after a staff member left.