Change Up The Way Your Office Handles Patient

Statements, Follow The Socrates Method (6 Steps

explained)

RCM Tip Of The Week

THE SECRET OF CHANGE IS TO FOCUS ALL OF YOUR ENERGY,

NOT ON FIGHTING THE OLD, BUT ON BUILDING THE NEW
SOCRATES

Socrates, one of the greatest thinkers of the age, was surely not thinking

about Revenue Cycle Management when he wrote this, however, it surely can apply!

When you think about this phrase in terms of Revenue Cycle Management, we can

say that there are many things that have been done the same way in many

practices for many years, for the shear reason of, we have always done it this way.

There are lessons to be learned when you decide to

clean up the old and focus on the new one aspect

of RCM, is Patient Statements, Often overlooked

and underworked properly. I worked with a practice

that had a statement problem, to the tune of about

500 statements we inherited when they signed up for

our services. As the Account Manager for this

practice, I took a look at the statement process and

discovered that out of the 500, about a fourth of them, were repeatedly being sent out since

2014/2015 for No Show fees of $25.00 a piece. I then discovered that there were another

fourth that were also for 2014/2015, due to balances equal to $5.00 or less. The next batch

were comprised of about another 50 statements that had Credit Balances on them and also

had not been worked since 2014/2015. Second to last, were about 90 statements that had

actual balances due, but had never been collected, also from 2014/2016 and then finally the

rest were 2016 (at that time the current year). The total reflected by all these patient

statements was a whopping $75000.00 uncollected as it initially appeared.

I took out the old balances that were from the No

Shows/$5.00 and under balances and that removed about

$20,000.00 right off the top and reduced the number of

statements going out twice a month by 200, so I was down to

300 statements to figure out. I then tackled the Credit

Balances, which dropped the old down to 210 statements

to work with and took another $15,000.00 off the top. Then

it was time to hit actual balances from 2014-2016. The first

New process I put in place was to review all payments

from Insurance and Patients on all of these remaining statement balances, to weed out

incorrectly posted payments. After that process of elimination of the Old, I was down to

100 viable and collectible patient statements, which equaled to a true balance due of

$30,000.00.

I put the following new processes in place: (6 steps

explained)
1. Run statements bi-weekly

2. Go through them and vet out credit balances, low balances ($5 and under), zero balances

put them on a warning/flag status on the patient account that says balance due prior to

next visit instead of sending 20 statements (costly to practice to keep doing when they

dont get paid)

3. Verify insurance and patient payments on all other statements to ensure that payments

have all been posted correctly (do this for credit balances as well)

4. For credit balances, verify who is owed the refund, patient or payer and refund

accordingly

5. For actual, true balances due, after all has been verified, send out to the patients no more

than three times and with three calls for follow up.

6. If the patient does not pay the balance after three calls and three statements, then you can

opt to put them in collections with an outside agency, as you can generally recoup about

15-30% of what is owed or you can also put a warning note on that patients account that

they must pay their balance due prior to any future services at the office.

So the moral of this story is the following:

Implement new processes out of the old and learn from what doesnt work to keep the
wheel of progress going forward in your practice

Read More: https://www.billingparadise.com/blog/handling-patient-statements-socrates-

method/?utm_source=blogpdf

888-571-9069 info@billingparadise.com