Gastroenterology Coding Alert

Too many days in A/R? Chances are your gastroenterology patients don’t understand your billing statements.

Even if your front desk procedures are optimal, you will still sometimes need to send billing statements that collect out-of-pocket payments from patients after they’ve left your office. The most cost-effective adjustment to your revenue cycle might just work collections miracles: retool the template for the billing statements your practice sends to patients.

Rules to live by: First, do no harm. Second, do more with less. Remove the clutter on your statements and highlight the crucial information.

Here are seven recommendations for making patient billing statements easier to decipher, available from the Healthcare Financial Management Association:

1. Make sure you’re clear that it’s a bill. Patients can easily confuse bills with EOBs and other non-actionable statements, so use clear phrases like “Bill for gastroen­terology services for your 10/14/2016 visit.” Use arrows and other eye-catching graphics with phrases like “Please pay this amount” to reinforce the message.

2. Provide an easy-to-read description of the services being billed. Save the acronyms, skip the medical codes and hold off on medical jargon.

3. Explain what the patient’s insurance is expected to pay. List the primary and secondary insurance providers as well as the amount still to be paid.

4. Clearly state what you expect the patient to pay. Provide a clear label of the amount with distinct language like: “due from patient.”

5. Supplement the itemized, “business part” of the statement with clear directions in plain English. HFMA suggests something concise and direct like, “Thank you for selecting [insert your gastro office here]. Your health and satisfaction are our main concerns. We have billed your insurance company. However, as shown below there is a balance remaining. Please send the amount shown to the address above. Again, thank you for choosing us.”

6. Make sure patients know how to ask questions about the bill. Include a phone number in addition to the address where they should send payment. Provide the hours for when a staff member who can answer billing questions will be available. You might want to consider extending your billing department’s hours, if possible.

7. Make your statement easy to read. Here is some print readability advice from graphic designers:

• Use clean layouts with plain white backgrounds.
• White space is easy on the eyes.
• Use as large a font as you can, and avoid difficult to read fonts. Stick to sans serif (and avoid italics).
• Watch the leading (space between lines of text) and tracking (space between letters). If they’re too tight, your statement will be difficult to read.
• Use ragged right margins: justified margins make the text in your statement hard to read because of the spacing.

Tool: For more tips and sample billing statement templates, go to the HFMA’s Patient Friendly Billing Project page at https://www.hfma.org/patientfriendlybilling/.