The final process – Budget payment and move to collection agency
Some times patient may not be able to pay full payment of co-pay dues,
co-insurance dues, Deductible dues or any balance mentioned by insurance.
They would be ready to pay their dues in installments i.e. monthly fixed payments. Making the patient to come under Budget Payment System for paying their dues in installments is called as Budget Payment.
AR people have to discuss with their Supervisors and as per their discussion, they need to put the patient into monthly installment payment schemes.
They should clearly state that this arrangement to minimize the patient’s
burden and patient should not stop any monthly payments to the Doctors
Office.
We need to keep those patients in a separate Bill Cycle or in separate credit
status and a Control Log to be maintained all relevant patient details. If the patient does not pay their dues properly , then we need to inform the patient that their accounts would be moved to Collection Agency.
Moving Patients to Collection Agency
If the patient does not make any payment for his dues and not giving proper response for the calls, not attending calls, always stating that patient is not in the station and refusing to pay dues, then Billing office would be sending two bills to the patient and after 60 days, if there is no response, then thepatient account would be moved to Collection Agency.
After identifying the patient accounts which are to be moved to Collection agency, an excel spread should be prepared and sent to US office for approval. Once approval is received from US Office, then the patient account can be moved to internal collection agency or external collection
Agency. This process should be followed at the time of each and every patient is to be moved to collection agency.
There may be an internal collection agency or an external collection agency.
Their main function is to trace the patient and compel the patient to pay the dues or inform the patient that they may have to face legal action.
Internal Collection Agency would be setup by Billing office itself and they would send letters to patient requesting them to pay or there may be a legal action against them. There would not be any percentage or any share for the internal collection agency if they collect money from
patient. But in External Collection Agency, if they get payment from patient, then they would get approximately 35% of the collected money. The percentage is varies from collection agency to collection agency.
Normally Billing Office may not have their own Collection Agency. Because collection agency require more man power, need to spend more time, need to have people in various places and need to spend more money for searching patients, etc. So most of the billing offices hire the External Collection Agency and handover their accounts to them.
After handing over the accounts to Collection Agency, patients account balance would be changed as Zero and the balance would be moved to collection Account in the system. Once the payment is received then the balance would be retrieved in the patient account and payment would be
Applied.
