Payments are the lifeline of any business. And in healthcare practices, they typically don’t come at the time of service. Often, collections involve invoicing, claims and a solid process for communication and streamlined medical billing. Here are five tips to keep all of these moving parts in order – making your job easier and eliminating any obstacles in getting paid.
1. Customize invoice preferences
To ensure you communicate the best possible way, you will want to adjust the information that appears on the invoice. For instance, if the invoice was paid, you may or may not choose to display additional details of the payment on a printout (such as payment method). You may also want to present claimant information on EHC invoices, such as the claimant’s name and date of birth.
And last but not least, in cases where more than one healthcare provider was involved in a treatment, you may consider listing all participating providers on your invoice as it is described in our How to Print an EHC Invoice that shows Multiple Providers per Service article.
2. Avoid duplicate invoices
Did you know that when OCF-21s are denied due to missing or incorrect information, you have the option resubmit that same OCF-21 after making corrections?
From time to time, an MVA insurer or independent adjuster may reject your claims due to insufficient or inaccurate details on a submitted OCF-21. Instead of creating a new invoice for the same services, and thus, increasing the outstanding balance on the case file, you can simply change the invoice status to make it editable, make changes, and then resubmit. For more details, check out our Create and Submit OCF-21 article.
Yes, it’s that easy!
3. Distribute partial invoice payments
A partial payment is better than no payment at all.
When you receive partial payment from a Motor Vehicle or an Extended Health insurer, you will want to reconcile the patient file. You will also want to distribute the partial payment when there are two or more items on an invoice. The payment distribution will help you get accurate reports when you want to know what services were paid as well as how much.
For invoices that were paid in full, Universal Office will automatically distribute the payments. However, the partial payments must be distributed manually.
Find instructions on how to distribute payments in the Recording Payments article on our knowledge base.
4. Ensure the accuracy
Where do you start if partial payments have never been allocated or you simply want to know whether the distribution was done in the first place?
The reports, available in the Payments to the Check/Fix folder in our Template Library, can answer that question. Don’t stress over unallocated payments. Simply extract reports that will help you sort them out. Remember, those reports are a great starting point for collections.
5. Improve your collections process
Our Reports Manager is a powerful tool that helps keep your payments in check and provides you with more than 400 statistical and financial reports. This tool is the key when it comes to the overwhelming process of collecting outstanding balances – and bonus, it’s a great time saver too.
One of the many great examples is a report that groups your outstanding amounts by MVA adjuster. It would be a waste of your precious time chasing the same insurance adjuster who handles two or more patient files with outstanding balances. Simply run the report, contact the adjuster and go over all overdue and outstanding balances in one call.
Making the move from treatment plan to collections a seamless transition is just one of the ways Universal Office is creating more efficient healthcare practices. The Universal Office system streamlines the collections process, giving you the knowledge and tools needed to get your medical billing and collections processes in order.
For additional information, check out 3 Strategies to Speed Up Collections & Improve Cash-Flow for MVA Files, and visit our blog for ongoing tricks and tips on improving processes in your practice management.
