Turning Red to Black Blog

As the Eve of All Hallows approaches, bringing with it the crunch of leaves beneath our feet, we, kindred spirits of the billing and revenue cycle domains of Dante’s sprawling Inferno don our masks of anonymity and set forth to fill our goody bags! We seek not trickery, nor sticky, sugary treats… we seek information on this eve and yearn to fill our coffers with all that our digital palettes can obtain!  Approaching each door, we ask in muddled tones, “Trick or Treat?” And if we are lucky, perhaps we shall be given these bits which can help ease the often-daunting nature of our daily accounts receivable tasks:

It is important to start including billing and contact language in your Patient Agreement forms to allow your billing department and third-party vendors to contact your patients in the manner that they prefer.  Consider this, 2016 was the first year that saw the threshold of households with only cell phones and no landline surpass 50% and this number is only increasing by the day.  Not only that, but the way in which consumers communicate will change even further as messaging services – in their many incarnations – become more prevalent throughout your patient base and a millennial generation now coming into their own and having surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest living generation two years ago.

Simon’s Agency has spent the last fifteen years continually implementing strategies that will help us grow and improve our operations as a whole.  Each and every part of our process is analyzed and enhanced in order to confront both the newest challenges as well as the age-old ones that require a constant dedication to improvement. This is why we generally double the national average collection success rate across all sectors of healthcare providers.* 

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?