Turning Red to Black Blog

Over the last decade as Simon’s Agency has grown into a highly successful collection agency, we have prided ourselves on how often we hire first-time collectors as opposed to “seasoned,” lifelong debt collectors.  While we have certainly required collection experience for our managers and supervisors, our call center agents have more often than not come to us with little to no collection experience and there is a very important reason for this.

A call comes in and you have a patient on the phone. You have their account in front of you and know what they owe and why they owe it. But you don’t know what their circumstances are or if they are even ready to pay. How much time should you spend working with this patient?

What happens when you receive a call from your patient but they are insisting they cannot afford to pay the balance in full? At this point, the very first thing you should consider is that you have a willing payer on the phone. Don’t get thrown off balance by the negative implication of the patient being unable to pay the whole bill.  Instead, embrace the fact that they are calling to give you money. 

Before a successful billing and collections strategy can begin, your billing department needs to arm its employees with a plan of attack.  Developing a set of standard criteria gives your team the rules and direction they need to approach each account confidently and fairly.

Throughout the course of the last year we have outlined many topics in our blogs that help achieve a high level of recovery of outstanding patient debt. This work is performed across billing departments, early-out self-pay philosophies and third-party debt collectors – all of which rely on different levels of tools and similar techniques. Grouping these specialists into a single bucket of professionals, we paint a broad picture of what the amalgamated “Revenue Cycle Professional’s” Christmas list looks like.