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.

Doctors offices are seeing a decline in patients with adequate insurance who are now leaving illnesses untreated until they become much more severe. If those same patients had spent a little time helping to prevent those illnesses and treat them while they were still minor, then their overall medical bills would potentially have been much lower.

With a growing economic recession, many of these patients either have no health coverage, are under-insured and/or they’ve recently lost their jobs. Because of these, fewer patients are able to afford the costs for hospital treatment.

Patients don’t usually think about all the expenses and equipment costs connected with their treatment. They also don’t consider how the medical facility will pay the wages of all the staff during their time in the hospital.

Without adequate debt collection methods in place, many hospitals are putting off the purchase of much-needed diagnostic equipment. Other medical facilities are laying off staff, while some others will more than likely have to close their operations entirely unless they find ways 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

As part of your internal collections procedures, patients should be aware of your payment policies. As long as regular payments are received on time, there isn’t a problem. Once patients become delinquent in their payments, you need to state clearly that full payment will become due. If delinquencies continue, patients need to know that they will be forwarded to third party collection agencies to recover the bad debt.

3. Provide Financial Counseling

Financial counseling offered to patients can improve the rate of repayment to the hospital, and reduce the overall amount of bad debt that would likely have been written off. Financial counseling can help patients with budgeting issues, and possibly even help them find ways to continue with their payment plans.

4. Collection Agencies

If you have continued delinquent patient accounts, with them making no attempts toward making payments or arrangements, you should consider hiring outside collection agencies to recover these bad debt 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.