You practice cannot afford to not to identify areas of potential lost revenue. This and future blog posts will explore some areas you may want to take a look at.
Under charging patients cash at the time of service. For whatever reason, you have a handful of patient that come in and pay cash for your services. Are you or someone reviewing the charge amounts to make sure the patient is being charged the appropriate amount for the time spent at the office. If you are seeing a patient for thirty minutes, but "feel sorry for the patient" and charge them only for fifteen minutes, this can add up. Let's say that happens over the course of a year by ten different healthcare providers, a total of 650 times. So instead of charging $150, $75 is charged. A total revenue loss of $48,650 has just happened, and you have no way of making that up.
Front-office staff over collects from the patient. This happens far more often than you might think. The insurance verification has been completed, and a week later the patient comes in. The patient has a $5,000 deductible and $850 still needs to meet. Well, if your front-office staff collect up front and don't keep track of the total amounts they are collecting, they can over collect from the patient. Even small amounts add up when patient come in for more than one visits, over the course of a year. So, your billing department now has to refund approximately $30,000 to patients that have been over collected on. This not only means that you're now out that $30,000, but if you bonus your front-office staff a small percent (say 2 percent) on that $30,000, you are also out $600. So, now you're up to $30,600.
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