When trying to navigate the complexities of healthcare, independent practices face many challenges including those related to medical billing. And these challenges are often compounded by things like complicated insurance rules, confusing regulations, coding errors, and high administrative costs. 

To make collecting patient payments easier, it’s important to evaluate and improve current medical billing processes, implement new payment policies, and train staff on billing and payment best practices. We take a closer look at ways medical practices can increase their collections and ensure a healthier financial future.

Establishing a successful patient payment collection process starts with evaluating your current practices to determine what is and isn’t working and making strategic adjustments.

When calculated and compared, these metrics can help guide your practice in making adjustments to current billing policies and protocols for a higher rate of success.

After you have a better understanding of your current medical billing practices, it’s time to assess your practice’s current financial policy or develop a new one. 

To get started, answer the following questions: 

Once created or updated, take steps to reduce the administrative burden on your staff by providing clear training on payment protocols. Additionally, take steps to improve the patient experience by clearly communicating payment expectations and prominently displaying payment policies in highly visible areas including:

Practices can leverage technology to make the patient payment process easier. And having the right tech tools can reduce the time and money your practice spends on collecting efforts. Consider implementing the following practices:

Medical practices can also use technology to quickly collect and verify insurance information to inform patients about the pricing of services and their financial responsibility after insurance is applied. This step can help reduce the amount of time and effort administrative staff spend following up with patients.

Additionally, according to Tebra research, patients appreciate having a patient portal to: 

Your practice can also improve patient satisfaction by empowering patients to quickly input and verify demographic and insurance information by providing a self-service kiosk in your office.

Make the collections process even easier by partnering with a medical billing company that has a proven success rate. With the processes and systems in place to take on the administrative load that comes with billing, a medical billing company can use technology like robotic process automation (RPA) to quickly automate billing processes. Technology like RPA can help your practice:

Practices that partner with a successful medical billing company can improve clean claim rates, reduce the number of days in accounts receivable, promote timely payments, and increase net collections. 

Delays in payments may be related to confusion and questions patients have about their medical bills and your practice’s billing policies. According to a 2024 Healthcare Financial Experience Study, 56% of surveyed patients said they felt stressed trying to understand what they owed and 28% of these patients said their confusion led to a delay in paying their medical bills.  

To combat confusion and avoid payment delays, train front office, medical, and billing staff to interpret and clearly communicate important payment information to patients. 

One way healthcare organizations can help patients is to clearly explain how waivers work. 

When it’s clear a patient’s insurer will not reimburse for the service, a practice should obtain a financial waiver. Medicare requires the use of an Advance Beneficiary Notification (ABN) for certain services to alert beneficiaries of the patient financial responsibility. These waivers notify patients upfront of their out-of-pocket financial obligation before performing the service. 

Medicare requires practices to provide ABNs at the point of care. For example, if a patient wants a B12 shot, it’s important for the tech who administers the shot to advise the patient (if applicable) that Medicare will not cover the treatment. 

The front office team is often the first point of contact for patient engagement and collecting correct patient information, which can lead to better overall collection practices. There are different ways to utilize your front office team to accurately collect patient information and offer direction on collecting payments upfront.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly 1 out of every 10 patients lacks insurance coverage. Practices can assist uninsured individuals in the following ways: 

After a practice takes the time to understand their current payment policies, establishes new systems, and trains staff on collection practices, it’s time to collect payments.

Collecting payments at the time of service reduces the time and expense associated with following up and trying to recover payments later. In the case of self-pay patients, practices may be able to incent prompt payment by offering a discount.

When interacting with patients about payment, use clear and definitive language. For example, instead of saying, “Would you like to pay?,” use a script similar to, “How would you like to pay today?” You can even write out the receipt — demonstrating your intention to promptly collect.

It isn’t always possible for a patient to pay their entire bill post-visit. A practice can set up payment plans with effective terms. Elements of an effective payment plan include:

When a patient is set up on a payment plan, it’s important to have a way to monitor and track payment activity. Create a separate category for patient receivables tied to payment plans and monitor performance. It's also important to establish a protocol for tracking patient receivables to keep abreast of missed payments.

Paying in full at the point of service isn’t always possible for patients so it’s important that practices establish ways to collect payments post-visit. For example, send emails and text messages to promote post-visit payments and provide easy payment options like online payment..

Establish a dismissal policy for non-paying patients with bad debt. Practices that fail to dismiss non-paying patients are more likely to experience additional problems with non-payment if word gets out that the practice tolerates this behavior. 

To have a healthy revenue cycle, every practice needs to establish effective payment and collection policies and practices. By implementing collection processes that leverage technology, clear communication, and practice staff — healthcare practices can increase their collections and ensure a healthier financial future for their operations.

Avoid medical billing headaches by partnering with us. Tebra offers billing and payment software to help easily collect patient payments.