3 Strategies to Improve Emergency Medicine Self-Pay Revenue and Patient Deductibles

Many times in medical emergencies doctors and other hospital staff offer care parking the expenses discussions for later. This often leaves the practices in a challenging situation when it comes to collecting the fees or charges incurred for rendering the emergency medical services.

The cases leading to non-payment of emergency medical charges may include, patients’ inability to pay the huge medical bills, lack of relevant information related to patients’ insurance coverage, self-pay patients, or those enrolled under high-deductible insurance plans. The time taken into recovering the payments in such cases is significant and results in severe cash flow discrepancies for the hospitals and clinics.

Improve Emergency Medicine Self-Pay Revenue and Patient Deductibles

While the laws restrict the hospitals to not deny medical care to the patients in emergency, rare regulations have been made to look into the hospitals’ difficulty in improving the emergency medicine revenue in cases of self-pay and high patient deductibles.

Here are a few steps that you may take in such a situation:

Understating the patients demography, financial ability and communicating with them candidly

The hospitals may devise a system where one of their well-trained staff members can interact with the patient or a relative, either before the treatment is provided or soon after, to understand the basic details about their comprehension of the medical billing process, their current capability to pay the medical expenses, their insurance coverage plans, and out-of-pocket expenses.

Once these details are collected, the staff member can communicate without restraint about the fees and costs involved in the treatment and what all they can expect from the hospital in terms of support and care. This will foster a sense of trust and financial responsibility in the mind of the patient enhancing the chances of bill payment. Efforts can be made to recover at least half of the medical bill payment before the services are rendered.

Proposing custom plans of payment

The hospitals may understand the patients’ ability and intent to pay the bills and suggest different plans through which payment may be made immediately or over some time. They can be given options of three, six, or more months to pay through regular installments. Making such plans interest-free may also improve the chances of increasing the revenue.

Offering online payment options

Several customers prefer to pay online and the dearth of such payment options in hospitals along with poor customer support may deter them from making the payments for long durations. Online and digital means of payments may be adopted and promoted to avoid such cases.

Outsourcing payment collection process to third party professional agencies

Medical billing and coding firms understand the process of billing and payments. In the case where patients have failed to make the payments after several follow-ups and reminders by the hospitals’ internal revenue collection teams, these professional agencies can help expedite recovery.

A professional medical billing company can help you formulate robust strategies beforehand to deal with self-pay collection issues and make efforts in recuperating the chances of getting the medical payments sooner.

Atlantic RCM is one of the leading multi-specialty medical billing companies in USA that serves 25+ major medical billing specialties. Our experts work across your practice in billing, collections and account receivables management, to help you succeed.

Get in touch with the leading medical billing outsourcing company to learn more. Call us at (469) 501-1500 or write to us Info@atlanticrcm.com