Wiki Patient responsibility

[Christal]

We turn our patients over to a debt collector once we receive no activity from them after 4 statements. The amount is $50.00 or more to send to the agency. How do you handle the balance till it is paid? Do you let it sit out on A/R or do you write off to bad debt and if you ever receive a payment from the agency or a patient then make the adjustment? I am wanting to clean up our patient A/R.

 

[trarut]

I've worked places where we've done it both ways. Our current PM system has a bad debt bucket and balances sent to the collection agency are moved there so we can still easily see the balance in the patient account but it's no longer included in the patient balance total and does not go out on statements.

The last practice I was at, one of the PM systems we had did not have a bad debt bucket. We set up specific bad debt adjustment codes and wrote off balances sent to the collection agency with those codes. Frankly, it was a major pain because, if the patient decided they wanted to pay off their account, we had to go back and look at the account history, locate all of those adjustment codes and manually calculate the outstanding balances.