Physician office potential lost revenue opportunites Part 2

Here are some other ideas to consider:

Missed chart notes.  Sometimes things get busy and healthcare staff cannot keep up on their paperwork.  A week goes by, and then a month, and perhaps a few more and patients’ notes are not written and billed out to insurance companies for payment.  Even just a few notes from each provider can add up to a significant amount.  Identify through your EHR program what those missed notes were and get those written down.  Calculate what your overall percent collections are at (say 65 percent of billed charges).  If you are missing 300 notes at an average billed amount of $200 each, you are looking at a loss of $39,000 in lost revenue.

A patient has come in, interacted in a negative way with a staff member and you choose to not bill the patient at all.  This is called a NO BILL or a “Courtesy Write Off.” I do not advise in this type of behavior just to keep the patient happy and not write a bad review of your practice.  Speak honestly with the patient and try to resolve the issue.  If you had 150 occurrences of these courtesy or NO BILL adjustments over the course of a year at an average of $130 inflow potential, you have just adjusted yourself out of $19,500.

Do you have a cancellation policy that includes patients who no-show for visits?  You should.  If you add up these cancels and no-shows over the course of a year and find that 500 of these instances have occurred, you have not only lost $65,000 in potential inflow from those lost appointments.  Now, if you take it one step further, and say you have a policy of a fee for a last minute cancellation or a straight up no-show (less than 24 hours), but don’t charge the patient for not attending their appointment, you’ve also lost ,000 in cancellation fees.

With the ones listed above and the related blog post, you can easily reach a half-million dollars in lost revenue by just working through your day and not paying close attention to those small, insignificant occurrences.  If you have ten or more employees who are billing out visits, its time to sit down with them and help them understand that on occasion, these types of things will happen.  If they each perform ten occurrences of each of these categories, plus more you will identify, you can see how quickly these lost opportunities will add up, causing you to lose a lot of potential inflow.