Practice Management Alert

Question: A self-pay patient of ours died, and we sent the outstanding bill to his spouse. She sent the bill back, unpaid, with a copy of his death certificate. Do we have any recourse to seek the payment for services?

Florida Subscriber

Answer: If you want to pursue payment on this bill, you need to find out about the dead patient's estate. The estate's executor is responsible for ensuring that all debts against the estate get paid. However, in many states when a patient dies, anyone who is owed anything by the deceased can file a claim against the estate within a certain time limit.

To find out what the law is in your state, contact a trust and estates attorney in your area. Once the time limit is up, you cannot file anything against the estate and you must write off the bad debt.

To file a claim, you-ll need the:

- name, address and phone number of the law firm handling the estate

- name of the court where the estate is filed

- filing's index number

- names and addresses of the executor or administrator of the estate.

In some areas, a portion of this information appears online or in the local newspaper. You can also attempt to contact the patient's wife to obtain the information.

Warning: Because the patient's spouse is still living, it's possible that the entire estate just transferred over to her. If there is no estate, you can try to bill the family if your state allows it. In this case, you-ve already tried that, so you may be forced to write off the debt. Since the husband's debts passed on to the wife along with his assets, explore your state's rules on placing the debt with a collections agency.

-- The answers to the Reader Questions were provided and/or reviewed by Barbara J. Cobuzzi, MBA, CPC, OTO, CPC-H, CPC-P, CHCC, consulting editor of publications for the American Academy of Professional Coders, the coding organization in Salt Lake City.