Practice Management Alert

"It takes a village" applies not only to rearing children but to your collection process as well.

The billing department employees are not the only ones responsible for collecting payments from patients. Every staff member in the office should do her part to get patients to pay fully and promptly for healthcare. But not every staff member knows what she can do to help the collections process, and the billing department can help - by educating the entire office on how each department and every member has an integral role in the collections process.

As most medical offices know, effective bill collection begins with clear communication with patients. Employees are responsible for telling patients what to do and what to expect. Communication is something that needs to happen at many different points of contact, and there are several ways to recruit various staff members to work with patients to facilitate payment. Billing experts offer the following policies and processes to help you make the most of your time with patients. The first step toward effective practice-patient communication is to make sure everyone in the office understands her role in collecting bills. Every practice should have financial and billing policies. Working from these policies, managers should educate employees with written guidelines that outline the payment-collection responsibilities for each job description, says Lori Foley, CMA, CMM, a senior physician practice management consultant with Gates Moore & Co. in Atlanta.

The billing department also needs to teach employees how to ask for payment, Foley adds. She finds untrained employees often empathize with the patients and don't want to ask them for money. Because patients come to your practice when they're not feeling well, untrained employees can feel uncomfortable bringing up financial issues with them, she says. Don't tell your receptionist or check-out clerk to just "Ask for the money," Foley warns  tell them how to ask. "Would you like to pay today?" gets less money from patients than "How would you like to pay today?"

Once employees know they're responsible for participating in payment collection, managers need to hold them accountable for those activities, Foley stresses. If employees aren't following through on talking to patients about money, managers should work with those employees to get them up to speed. Scheduling the Appointment "Communication really starts from the very first contact with the patient," says Adrienne Rabinowitz, CPC, billing manager at Western Monmouth Orthopedic Associates in Freehold, N.J. When a new patient calls to schedule an appointment, the scheduler needs to determine how the patient will pay for the services. Ask: Is the patient insured, and what type of insurance is it? The scheduler should note whether the patient has workers' compensation, personal injury [...]