Strategies for Healthcare Providers to Reduce Outstanding Payments
Outstanding medical bills are a common problem for your healthcare company. It seems that you’re always waiting on patients to pay for their treatments.
Your company is not alone in this. Plenty of healthcare providers across the country struggle with getting payments for services rendered on time. The bill deadlines come and go, but the funds don’t come through.
So, what can your company do to minimize outstanding payments from patients? These are some strategies that should get more payments coming through by the due dates.
Send Reminders
Payment due dates will slip your patient’s mind. Remember: your company’s bill isn’t the only payment on their to-do list. They will be juggling a whole host of bills, from monthly mortgage payments to utility bills to subscription fees. So, it’s easy for your bill to get lost in the shuffle.
To make sure that your provider’s payment is a top priority for a patient, send them a reminder before the bill’s due date. You can send this reminder via email, text message or phone call, depending on the patient’s preferred mode of contact.
These are essential tips for sending effective reminders:
● Be polite: The reminder should not be aggressive in any way. An aggressive tone could backfire and discourage the patient from paying on time.
● Be clear: State all of the information that the patient needs to know about their upcoming payment, including the total amount due, the due date and the payment methods available to them.
● Be brief: Do not add unnecessary information to your reminder. The longer your message is, the less clear it will be.
● Be persistent: Do not just send a single reminder before the bill is due. Send several scheduled reminders before the bill is due (for example, a month before the due date, a week before the due date and then a day before).
Provide Multiple Payment Options
Having multiple payment options available will increase the likelihood of your patients paying on time. So, try to offer as many payment methods as possible, such as credit cards, debit cards, checks, cash and wire transfers.
Increase the locations where patients can make these payments. They don’t have to make them at your company’s office. They can make them through an online portal or mobile app. That way, patients can easily complete payments from home.
Offer Payment Plans
Patients might not be able to cover a bill on time when it’s a large lump sum. So, to minimize the risk of an overdue bill, offer an installment-based payment plan. Patients might have an easier time covering the expense when it’s divided into smaller chunks.
These are essential tips for effective payment plans:
● Keep interest low: payment plans should be interest-free or low-interest. A high-interest plan will undermine the purpose of the payment plan and give the patient a greater financial burden to handle.
● Customize the plans: Base the installment schedule of the payment plan on a patient’s financial situation. So, if they’re struggling financially, spreading the installments farther apart would be helpful.
● Be clear: The terms of your payment plans should be completely clear to patients, including the installment amounts and the due dates.
● Send reminders: Installment plans will give patients more deadlines to follow. Those are more dates that they could potentially lose track of. So, be sure to schedule reminders before every installment deadline.
Consider Pre-Collection Services
Prevention strategies like sending periodic reminders and setting up payment plans take lots of time and energy. If your company can’t juggle all of these administrative tasks, that’s fine–there’s a simple solution out there. Your company can outsource these administrative tasks to a debt collection firm that offers pre-collection services.
Outsourcing these tasks to a third party means that your staff members don’t have to add pre-collection responsibilities to their already packed to-do lists. They can focus on their regular workloads, and leave pre-collection to the pros.
What About Current Outstanding Payments?
Minimizing future outstanding payments doesn’t resolve the whole financial problem. Your company is still missing funds from medical bills that are already overdue. Your company needs those funds to come in – and to come in soon – to maintain cash flow and sustain your operational expenses.
So, how do you resolve this part of the problem? You should hire a compassionate debt collection firm to help you recover those outstanding payments.
Why You Shouldn’t DIY Debt Collection
It can be frustrating to face so many overdue payments. So, to recoup them, you might be tempted to try DIY debt collection. This is not a good idea.
For one, you could accidentally violate rules and regulations regarding debt collection, like the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The FDCPA prohibits the use of aggressive collection tactics, like calling patients over and over again to seek payment. Violating this act could lead to legal consequences, including a fine.
You also don’t want to scare off your patients with aggressive practices. You want your patients to seek our healthcare when they need it – even if it’s not financially convenient for them.
This is why you should contact a debt collection agency. An agency will know the laws of the land, so its collection strategies won’t violate debt collection regulations like the FDCPA. All collection actions will be professional, ethical and above-board.
An agency will also provide some distance between your company and the patient, so there are fewer tensions with collecting funds. Your company can maintain a positive relationship with the patient after the issue is resolved. There will be no hard feelings.
Choose a Firm with a Compassionate Approach
When it comes to recovering medical debt, you need to use a debt collection firm that has a compassionate approach. Medical debt is a sensitive topic. Patients aren’t incurring medical debt for fun, and they aren’t missing their medical bill payments for no good reason.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 41% of adults have some form of healthcare debt in the United States. Patients often struggle to pay their medical bills on time because the cost of healthcare can be very high, especially when considering gaps in health insurance coverage.
Some adults don’t have health insurance at all. The U.S Census Bureau reported that 92% percent of the U.S population had health insurance in 2023, meaning 8% had no insurance coverage. Without insurance coverage, medical bills can be extremely expensive.
As a healthcare provider, you should anticipate that you will face some overdue medical bills. Healthcare is expensive, and some of your patients will inevitably struggle to cover the costs of treatments in full and on time. It’s just a fact of the current healthcare system.
This doesn’t mean that healthcare providers should accept defeat and become inundated with overdue bills. As you can see, there are plenty of steps that you can take to help patients cover their treatment costs on time. Your company can be compassionate without completely compromising its financial stability.
