Low-Hanging Fruit: Best Practices for Collecting Aging Patient A/R

If working A/R is not something that your practice prioritizes, you might be in for a bit of a shock at the end of the fiscal year. Balances can fall through the cracks, and patients can simply choose not to pay for prolonged periods–these situations can snowball quickly.

Luckily, we can confidently assure you that there’s nothing to truly lose sleep over.

While putting patient care and smooth clinic operations first should absolutely be your focus, it is still incredibly important to cover your bases when it comes to the A/R management.

In this article, you will learn useful pro tips and industry best practices for addressing your carried patient A/R. Many of these are currently used by top-performing dental organizations that use Pearly for patient billing.

HOW TO COLLECT MORE PATIENT A/R

‍

BEST PRACTICE #1: Establish protocols for damage control. 

Regardless of how much A/R you’re carrying, there is always a course that you can plot to stabilize. The first step is to triage your carried A/R by running aging reports to determine balance categories to be addressed for collection. 

We cover some approaches for conducting this aging report in this Dentistry Huddle post. 

It’s often the case that there is a gradient of collection difficulty–there will be plenty of easy wins, big whale balances, and pesky small balances that have added up and pose significant write-off risk.

By sitting down with your aging report and determining these cohorts, you get a better sense of what can realistically be collected in a short period, and what will need to be whittled away at.

But this should not be just a one-time event for your practice. We can’t emphasize enough the importance of a regular review of your A/R aging report. Make this a prioritized task on your monthly or quarterly process checklist.

‍

BEST PRACTICE #2: Audit your collection process from start to finish.

Once you understand your balance cohorts, it’s time to take a good look at how you’re currently trying to collect those balances. Determine the cost/time outlay of your current efforts to collect, drilling down into the minutiae of each step. 

Don’t just stop at “call the patient”–give a critical assessment of the language you’re using with patients and the cadence of outreach.

Doing this audit on an annual basis will iron clad your collection process.

‍

BEST PRACTICE #3: Work the A/R (Gradually).

With the click of a button, some billing outreach tools have the power to send physical and digital statements to all past due patients all at once. While it might be tempting to use this functionality, we strongly suggest that you sit down and map out a plan to gradually work your carried A/R.

Put simply, don’t send statements to all patients all at once–use those defined patient balance cohorts to identify low-hanging fruit and collect those first before tackling more complex cases.

You’ll be able to manage any angry or frustrated calls from patients with this approach, and will likely collect more than you expect.

‍

BEST PRACTICE #4: Use collection software to automate A/R management and past-due balance collection.

• Designate patient cohorts.

• Send statements to the right guarantors.

• Follow up on a regular cadence along a workflow.

• Provide a modern payment experience.

• Generate insightful reports to inform your decisions.

The software tools that you use for patient billing need to cover all these bases in order to have a streamlined outreach process.

With RCM automation software like Pearly, you’ll have all of these billing tools in one easy-to-use suite.

The tool you use also needs to have a way to gradually escalate the language and tone of your billing notifications. In a recent study, we deduced that using dynamic escalation instead of the same static statement language increases the likelihood of payment by 7.3%.

‍

BEST PRACTICE #5: Encourage inbound billing clarification calls

In many situations, you may have reached out to patients via phone call to notify them about a past-due balance.

If you’re leveraging software like Pearly that can empower your RCM team with billing automation software tools, you won’t have to worry about spending time on outbound phone calls.

Instead, patients with questions about a bill can reach out to your practice to inquire about the payment–often on a schedule that matches your practice’s bandwidth.

This is actually a customer success opportunity and leads to an overall reduction in calls. In fact, we have found that for every inbound call that a practice receives, there are 3 outbound calls that that practice would have made. The time saving benefit from this dynamic is apparent.

‍

BEST PRACTICE #6: Leverage Prevention Strategies

There is an equilibrium that your practice can reach where you’re consistently running billing campaigns and your A/R aging distribution meets industry benchmarks.

To get there, you will need to be proactive about sending the right billing message to the right patient, at the right time.

It might go without saying, but if you collect A/R before it ages you won’t have anything to worry about.

But getting to the point where your patients are trained to pay their bills on time requires a sophisticated billing outreach protocol and often years of fine-tuning.

You’ll need clear financial policies established and communicated upfront (e.g. late fees or payment plan options). You’ll also need a case acceptance process to educate and set expectations for treatment plans.
‍

The only takeaway you really need

Aging A/R is hard to collect. Don’t panic. Make a game plan. Arm yourself with the right tools. Work it gradually.

If you accomplish all of this, you’ll never have to worry about that big A/R monster ever again.

‍

‍