Health plays an important economic role in modern society. Despite widespread access to technological and human resources, the US economy faces significant problems with bankruptcies rising from healthcare debt, healthcare costs and uncompensated care.

Let's be honest, patient statements can be confusing. There's often so much jargon on them that patients don't know when to pay their bill, let alone how to pay it. So, what can you do to simplify statements, and is it even possible to make things easier? We think so. Here's an overview of what's going wrong with patient statements and how to fix them.

Each year hospitals and health clinics lose billions of Medicaid dollars from:

Keeping track of employees is not an easy task. Management often spends a lot of time focusing on what employees are doing, where the "wasted" time is spent, and how to do things faster - making their company lean, mean, and ready for action. No management team sets out to micromanage their employees, but rather to understand where time is spent in order to improve efficiency, productivity, and communication. Emerald has developed a number of processes that are designed to do just that. These three processes have had significant impacts on our organization. 

Paying for medical bills is a straightforward process, right? Although that may be the case when you're a seasoned member of the industry, it isn't an experience that translates to the rest of America. Just 60% of people feel comfortable paying their medical bills. Although the way patients pay their bills has evolved, it hasn't made life any easier for them. In a recent study that examined the consumer payment experience, surprising findings were made. By learning more about them, you can see how Emerald AR Systems could enhance patient communication for you.

Increasingly, people are turning to the internet and social media to find healthcare professionals when they need them. The visibility that sharing online has brought about makes maintaining a good reputation more difficult to attain and maintain. The medical industry has become more competitive, and reputation management is no longer optional for anyone in the industry.

Everyone loves surprises, right? Not when they're surprise out-of-network bills, which are more common than we'd like to think.

Surprise medical bills have been the focus of many discussions in Washington over recent months. They refer to services billed when a patient uses out-of-network providers in the following scenarios:

Have you been operating with an understaffed department? Are your 60-120-day buckets getting larger and larger? Do you have way too many manual processes? Were you nodding at any of these questions as you were reading them?  Adding more staff and manual processes are what I characterize as "band-aid" fixes -- great for clean-up projects, but not ideal as permanent solutions to a problem that will continue to rear its ugly head. 

There’s a goldmine hidden within your billing processes but finding and extracting the extra revenue on your own can take time and resources that few organizations have – unless they have the right partners.

Since Medicaid is a program that is jointly run by the federal and state governments, the billing requirements will vary from state to state. It's important that medical administration personnel in charge of billing understand the rules and protocols, especially where it relates to patient coverage. If a patient is denied Medicaid on the basis of failure to renew benefits, it may still be possible to receive Medicaid coverage through the program's reinstatement process. Note that this is different from situations in which a patient is denied Medicaid on the basis of income or has been otherwise excluded from Medicaid eligibility.