Help Decrease Your Hospital Bad Debt Using These 4 Tips

Hospital bad debt is one of the main reasons for more hospital closings across America. Hospital administrators are confronting increasing costs associated with treating more and more Americans with little to no health insurance. As more are using hospital emergency rooms to treat minor to serious illnesses, hospitals are finding it hard to recoup these costs.

Doctor’s offices are also seeing a decrease in patients with health insurance, as these illnesses are going untreated until they get far more serious. This results in much higher medical costs, since many of these illnesses are minor and preventable if treated earlier.

Many of these patients are uninsured, under-insured and/or recently lost their jobs. With a deepening recession, fewer and fewer patients can afford the costs of hospital treatment.

Patients dont tend to think about the high cost of the equipment involved in their treatment, nor do they consider how the facility will pay the wages for all the staff who participated in their hospital stay.

Unfortunately, without adequate debt recovery methods in place, many hospitals are putting off replacing much-needed diagnostic equipment. Others are putting off staff and delaying vital upgrades. Still others may also end up closing their doors unless ways can be found to recover hospital bad debt.

Listed below are 4 tips for decreasing or recovering hospital bad debt:

1. Payment Plan

Many fear large medical debts, in that large medical bills can seem impossible to ever pay off. By instituting payment arrangements, patients can make smaller, more manageable payments. Hospitals can recoup some of their bad debt and create positive cash flow.

2. Clear Payment Policies

Clearly stated payment policies should be part of your internal collections procedures. Patients need to know and understand these policies. There isn’t a problem as long as payments are made, and on time. However, should a patient fall behind in their payments, you need to make them aware that full payment will become due. If delinquencies fall further behind, patients should also know that these accounts will be forwarded to outside collection agencies to recoup the bad debt.

3. Financial Counseling

Offering financial counseling to patients will improve the repayment rate and reduce the overall amount of bad debt that would normally be written off. This counseling can also help them to re-prioritize their budgeting, and possibly help them to find ways to resume their payment plans.

4. Collection Agencies

If you have patients with growing delinquent accounts, and no payments or arrangements are being made, its time to outsource these to third party collection agencies to recover these delinquent accounts.

Debt collection agencies are able to help recover any delinquent hospital, medical clinic, or doctors office bills from your patients in a professional, timely manner.

David P. Montana has been a prominent industry expert, business consultant and author in collection agencies services for thirty years. He offers more helpful tips and resources on hospital bad debt and medical debt collection.

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