By Janah Legaspi


Many hospitals, health centers, clinics, dentists, medical facilities and health care providers these days are currently encountering economic challenges. They are losing substantial amounts of money resulting from the increase of delinquent accounts. In excess of 47 million Americans have no health care insurance protection at all, while those that do have protection are quite often under insured. You can give some of your overdue accounts to medical collection services to ease your burden.

Ahead of accepting a patient and providing medical service, medical agencies should acquire as much information approximately the patient as possible. At a minimum, the patient's full name, home and work addresses and telephone numbers, home, work and cell phone numbers, email addresses, social security number, date of birth, and the name of a relative must be maintained in addition to any insurance protection the patient may have. Should the account ever need to be sent for collection, this information will be essential to identify, locate and make contact with the patient.

Oftentimes, payment is not made simply because the patient is confused as to his/her obligations concerning deductible amounts, co-pays, insurance protection, etc. To eliminate any further confusion on both sides, make sure that before availing any kind of service, the payment policies as well as the patient's payment obligations have already been clarified. A medical debt collector can make it easier for you to collect from accounts that are in arrears.

Regarding debt for services made, a majority of the time, patients will just regard disregard overdue medical bills after they have received full medical treatment and are on the way to recovery. They might prioritize other bills such as mortgage, car payments, and credit card bills in excess of an overdue doctor's bill. But, when you make clear and reliable policies that involves giving statements every 2nd week of the month or every 15th days along with a phone call, you will easily ascertain the patients who will likely pay their bills from those patients who won't. Patients who are communicating with your office and show a sincere desire to pay their bills despite financial hardships they may be encountering should be handled in a different way from those who ignore your communications or simply won't make any payment arrangements at all. It would be best to forward the matter to the medical collection company if the patient has failed to pay his medical debt in 90 days.

You have two options if the patient will not be ready to pay his or her bills: one is by continuing to push for a collection and the other one is to just "write it off the invoice". If you want to find out if it a debt is worth pursuing, you ought to consider a few things, first of which is whether or not you want to keep the patient, because a lot of patients won't likely come back if their account has been placed with a collection attorney or company. Also, you have to really be sure that if the patient has Medicaid or Medicare insurance, its claims were submitted the right way.

Lastly, you will ought to figure out if the amount of the Claim is worth dispatching to a collection bureau or lawyer. If it is, you will need to ensure that the services were provided within the applicable Statute of Limitations period and send copies of the invoices, supporting documentation of the dates of service and types of service rendered, and any information you have concerning the patient's assets and employment to the collection agency or lawyer.




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