The electronic option is the easiest way to make patient payments to providers.
Many organizations have started using an online patient portal to collect patient payments. Yes Right
But the question is why does the patient balance increase after 30 – 60 days?
Because the patient is not aware of his/her plan type or coverage. How much does He/She have to pay & for what purpose? or what his/her insurance will pay, or how much is the patient responsibility.
Once the Patient receives the bill or statement few will make payment on the same day and some will not do…
For Patient responsibility, the statement will be sent once the EOB or ERA is received.
Sometimes it will take a longer time because insurance needs to pay.
The patient will make payment after receiving the statement or copy of the EOB from the insurance.
In the most common scenarios patient will not be receiving the statement because of wrong mailing or some other issue with the billing address.
If 3 statements have been sent and no response from the patient and no payment in the last 90 days then we share the patient details with the collection agency to collect payment.
This process will take a longer time to collect payment from the patient. Because the patient is not aware of the bill.
And one of the major issues is Eligibility & Benefit verification, which should be done once the patient reaches the front desk for an appointment. What we do as a billing company once the Patient appointment was scheduled we immediately do the insurance verification and send the report to the hospital instantly through the portal or Email on a daily basis, So if a patient is not eligible or if the policy is termed we can reach patient for some other insurance or either we can inform patient that for the service what he/she is going to avail, they have to pay it from there pocket or even for COPAY we can collect at the time of service.
Even if we are not able to do the insurance verification before the appointment we have to do it before entering the charge this way we are making sure that the provider or Hospital is getting their revenue without any discrepancy also we can reduce 70 -80% of denials and rejections
Solutions:
To avoid this we need to set up in Patient Portal to send some Alert Notifications once if there is any found while doing eligibility verification once the Patient appointment is scheduled or after the service rendered to the patient within 5-10 days through electronically like Mobile Message & E-mail along with a portal link to update correct details or to make payment online.
This will helps the patient to view the bill.
Timely Alert Message helps to reduce the delay time of making patient balance/payment & also useful to the patient to update the Insurance information.
Also mention Customer support #, Patient may reach and clarify the bill
Please feel free to reach us for more details
Steven Smith (steven@peraxahealthcare.com)
Phone – +1 551 212 8182