Without a doubt emergency medicine billing ad coding for hospitals presents some vital challenges. Doctors are under extreme pressure to provide the best care possible while reducing the wait times of the patients. Due to this paperwork and data inputs often take a back seat due to critical healthcare issues.
When we talk about self-pay patients, there are three situations to look into, such as the patient must be uninsured, underinsured or he must be the member of a high-deductible health plan (HDHP). However, in today’s healthcare landscape there are effective and simplified up-front processes and a highly personalized approach to emergency medicine patient billing, self-pay collections can be significantly reduced as it influences optimal and timely reimbursement.
Critical ways to improve self-pay collections
Communicate with patients regarding revenue cycle
Your in-house front desk staff should openly communicate to patients what their estimated financial requirements will be and if possible collect 40 % to 50% before service. Preferably, your staff can evaluate patients’ ability to pay and, and develop payment plans that allow them to pay the remaining amount over time. Answering reimbursement questions and counseling patients for payment is a good way to ease the anxiety of the patient.
Provide easy access to payment processing
Improving emergency medicine self-pay collections at the point of service includes providing the perfect coaching designed to help your in-house staff more easily ask for the payment early.
Paying bills online an option
As we live in a digital world, many patients are used to medical bills online and emergency medicine self-pay collections should be no different. Provide patients with online payment option so they can check what their insurance has covered, validate recurring payments and make payments anytime and anywhere.
Create an efficient process
The most important thing improving your emergency medicine self-pay collections is by setting up an efficient process for follow-up phone calls and managing patient queries. Review the patient payment process by emailing or calling them regularly to ensure they are streamlined and that staff is responsive.
Clear he clutter: Have a proactive formula
Even though emergency self-pay risks are many, but most hospitals don’t know where to begin, or they lack the resources such as an efficient emergency medical billing and coding team.
A professional medical billing service provider analyses your operational needs and creates a workflow customize your hospital billing. This is done by implementing workflow technology to help your in-house staff estimate patient costs, verify insurance eligibility and evaluate patients’ propensity to pay.
A dedicated medical billing and coding staff to work with you and your patients without increasing the overhead cost makes sense. At Medisys we provide predictive dialers (if available in the state law) to follow up on emergency medicine self-pay compulsions early and help you field patient complaints as well.
