Practice Management Alert

What your patients don't know can hurt your accounts receivable. The more you tell patients about billing from the start, the better your collections will be.

By giving patients a financial policy that describes your billing protocol, you prepare them for a proper relationship with your office. The policy tells patients that as customers, they bear a financial responsibility for the care they receive. The following expert advice offers key pointers for designing an effective financial policy. But there's no cookbook solution for finding the financial policy that works best for the patients you serve. You must tailor these general pointers to communicate with the type of patients that frequent your office. What Policies Should State "Be very direct and specific" about your collections policy, says Lori Foley, CMA, CMM, a senior consultant in Atlanta with Gates Moore and Co. She suggests that you do the following when you create a financial policy: Begin your policy by stating responsibilities, starting with yours. The policy should immediately elaborate on your practice's obligations: "to provide quality care and assist them with getting their insurance company to pay their bills appropriately," she says. Then add the patient's responsibilities. After you have highlighted your practice's responsibilities, you should explain that the practice must collect copayments according to the patient's plan, Foley says. You should forewarn patients that they might be responsible for a deductible and coinsurance. You should also inform patients that insurance claims will be filed with the practice's participating payers and, as a courtesy, to nonparticipating payers, Foley adds. She directs offices to alert patients that they may be responsible for payment if the insurance company does not pay the claims. Highlight key information. Practices sometimes choose to bold significant information  the same kind of information a credit-card company may put in fine print. For example, if you assess a fee for delinquent accounts or if you send patients to collections for unpaid bills, don't hide the bad news. Provide patients with copies of your financial policy. It will help patients if you make a copy of your financial policy for them to take home, Foley says. Tell patients to refer to it if they have any questions about their bills. How to Present Your Policy Ross Rohde, a practice administrator for a 45-physician multispecialty group in Atlanta, recommends limiting the financial policy to one page. It should be written in language understandable to someone with an eighth- to 10th-grade education, and purged of any technical medical terms, Rohde says. Another alternative is to insert your financial policy into a more comprehensive practice brochure, says Victoria Jackson, administrator and CEO of Southern Orange County Pediatric Association in Lake Forest, Calif. Jackson's practice [...]