Stop the Money Drain

Increase your revenue
How to increase your revenue and reimbursement rates
Today, the demands of financial responsibility placed on patients for the care you deliver has never been greater. New high deductible and consumer-directed health plans have shifted the payment burden to patients who often only know that they are sick, not how much their treatment will cost. This new dynamic threatens to spark an explosion in self-pay and bad-debt classes that many providers are currently not equipped to face or prevent. The resulting financial troubles could then threaten to impact the delivery of care for everyone.

This scenario is not unstoppable, however, there are important steps providers can take to maximize reimbursements and minimize bad-debt losses. With the right processes in place, providers can proactively work with patients to agree upon payment structure that works for all sides and prevents the negative impact lost revenue has on daily operations.

Here are a few tips that may help your healthcare business:

• Make your patient registration as accurate as possible because it's your best chance to maintain contact with the patient throughout the process. Many write-offs occur because of inaccurate information during this stage which can make it difficult or impossible to contact a patient after the delivery of care.

• Utilize electronic eligibility and benefits verification to create an accurate accounting of what the patient will be responsible for after third party or payer contributions. Many payers and vendors offer this service and the savings can vastly outweigh the costs.

• Be timely and accurate with your billing and make sure your patient statements are as clear as possible to the patient. A patient being consistently confused about what they are actually paying for can create mistrust. Make sure your billing documents are detailed, but still as readable as possible to people with no medical training.

• Have a clear, consistent payment policy that you give to the patient before the delivery of care. This payment policy should define the terms and payment schedule to expect from the patient. Defining this for patients prior to providing service helps reduce confusion for any financial responsibility they may carry after any procedure.

• Reduce staff turnover so that you are not constantly training new registration personnel. Mistakes made in the initial registration process are a primary cause for future billing and payment problems.

Get the right automated solutions for your situation. Automated solutions can help identify hard-to-find payment opportunities that manual processes miss often even correcting mistakes in patient information. These solutions can offer tremendous return-on-investment because of the revenue they capture which may have otherwise been lost forever.


These tips are just the beginning of what you can do to prevent painful lost revenue and make sure you get paid the largest portion of the total amount possible. Plain and direct communication with your patients can be the key to keeping your healthcare business secure and profitable no matter how the healthcare industry changes in the coming years and decades.

The Emdeon Reimbursement & Revenue Analytics suite of solutions captures payment information and automatically scans to find even the most remote payment opportunities. To learn more about how we can help you capture more revenue and prevent write-offs call us today at 877.EMDEON.6 (877.363.3666) or visit us online.

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