Practice Management Alert

You may have to implement major improvement changes to get the collections results you want. But restructuring will end up "working great" for your collections rate, as it did for Monica Roybal, at St. Vincent hospital, the Santa Fe Regional Medical Center in New Mexico. Roybal's collections staff decreased their 90-120+ days A/R from 40 percent to 15 percent in just one year when they implemented these steps:

Reassign the billing team to insurance groups (Medicaid, BSBS, PHP, etc.). This type of work allocation is "the best collection scenario I have been involved with," says Kim McDonald-Buckley, who once worked at a six-orthopedist group.

Analyze the month-end insurance A/R and the percent trends of their insurance assignments.

Conduct minor audits on daily work prior to closing or processing claims to ensure clean claims and accurate receipt posting. Conduct more extensive audits if the numbers reflect increased write-offs in a particular area. Have your business manager scan over the aging sheets to "make sure [you tackle] large, older balances," McDonald-Buckley says.

Share success stories and strategies at weekly meetings.
Rotating which employee takes phone duty or files paper claims is what McDonald's office does so that no one person is bogged down in other administrative tasks.