Hospital Medical Billing Service Collections

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Improving Efficiency for a Hospital Medical Office

In a hospital medical office, it is very crucial to always be looking for a more efficient means of operating. Whether you’re trying to simplify processes currently in place or free up time for your staff to focus on more patient-focused tasks, increased productivity is an objective every successful hospital invests much time and resources to achieve.

When taking into consideration and evaluating all the procedures your hospital can improve on, your primary list should, ultimately, include the medical billing and service collections processes currently in place. These are systems that need to be assessed every two to three years, if not even sooner, due to the constant technological advancements and industry innovations being developed in the hospital medical billing sector. With such a dynamic environment, efficiency is being improved upon as hospitals look to adapt to their patient needs.

Hospital medical billing is a key component to both profitability and overall prosperity. The primitive times of complicated medical billing statements that may as well be written in hieroglyphics should be a thing of the past. Patients should be able to easily decipher what services they are being charged for and the medical fees associated as well as having viable options to access and pay these balances. In the end, it becomes an added benefit for the patient and the hospital when being able to better communicate the medical billing statements. A great deal of attention must be directed at the ease of implementation of a new billing system in addition to the capital expenses associated with infrastructure needs.

In your mind, does your current patient billing system make it easier for you staff to operate in an efficient manner?

Do you have to think on that for a few moments? If so, then you might want to explore the options available to you. When referring back to your hospital objectives, evaluating a new and more efficient hospital medical billing service might be just what your office needs to greatly impact your payment collections efforts.

Online Payments

Online Payments

When it comes to payment for hospital medical billing, an online payment portal is the most convenient method. Offering your patients a 24/7 portal option to use a credit card or electronic check makes viewing and paying off their balance much easier.

Over-the-Phone Payments

Over-the-Phone Payments

An interactive phone service enables your patients to make payments by easily calling in to our dedicated service lines. This is very beneficial if they don’t have an internet connection or if they are more comfortable giving their information over-the-phone.

Lockbox Payments

Lockbox Payments

A large majority of patients rely on the postal system as a means of paying their hospital medical bills. This is why Emerald offers the lockbox option for processing, depositing, and posting payments to their account through traditional mail.

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Why Enable Patients to More Easily Make Payments?

An aspect that is often overlooked is the “user-friendliness” of the invoicing process for hospital medical billing. When there is a system in place that makes it difficult for patients to understand how they are being charged, what they are being charged for, and how to pay towards their balance, the system needs to be reevaluated. This leads to having to invest more resources into bad debt recovery efforts.

 

Hospital Medical Billing Service Collections

 

Emerald AR Systems are designed for easy implementation and zero capital expense for huge infrastructure gains. Emerald’s patient billing services are designed for easy implementation and their system is constructed to allows clients to not have to worry about the planning, development, and capital costs associated with improving their patient billing capabilities and processes.

By improving your hospital office’s ability to collect patient payments, you coincidently increase your overall patient satisfaction. Giving them the capability and convenience of providing multiple payment channels will assist in ensuring that they have access to their delivery method of choice. Our multi-channel payment architecture includes credit cards, debit cards, and electronic check payments.

Emerald provides a single file to import credit card payments, lockbox payments, web payments, and phone payments. Our patient payment suite provides fully reconciled payment files posted in a fraction of the time and expense of operating your own lockbox or manual posting process.

 

Clearer and Easier Medical Billing Benefits Your Hospital

Patient payments are a vital part of revenue cycle management, but when patients fail to take financial responsibility, hospitals take a hard hit. Since 2000, U.S. hospitals have provided more than $502 billion in uncompensated care expenses, according to a report by the American Hospital Association.

This issue of uncompensated care expenses is the primary reasoning why Emerald looks to make medical billing more clear for patients to understand and easier to payoff balances. We provide statements that are broken down and can be easily comprehended. By ensuring that these statements are written in clear language, we are able to reduce the confusing healthcare language and verbiage.

Patients are able to very quickly understand what the they are being charged for with an itemized list clearly outlining what is owed. By laying out the necessary details in the statement, the patient is able to better identify issues that need to be addressed before their balance can go unaccounted for and turn into a bad debt recovery issue. Along with a clearer hospital medical billing statement, Emerald also assists patient in the process by offering a variety of options to view and pay their bill.

 

 

We Offer a Customer Service Focused Call CenterHospital Medical Billing Service Collections

A study of nearly 35,000 online reviews of medical billing office’s nationwide has found that customer service is patients’ chief frustration, not physicians’ medical expertise and clinical skill.

As an extension of your hospital, we equip you with a customer service staff. This customer service call center is staffed with highly trained agents who act as the voice of your medical billing and service collections department. It is their duty to create a positive experience for your patients when they have any questions or issues with their hospital billing.

The entire customer service staff is located here in the US. They are also capable of handling calls for both English and Spanish speaking patients. They will look to follow the guidelines that you have outlined related to your respective medical billing policies. We record all calls for you as well as review them to ensure that our agents provide exceptional customer service.

 

How We Lower Your Call Volume

  • Answer general billing questions
  • Update information (Personal & Insurance)
  • Set up payment arrangements
  • Process payments
  • Inform patients on financial policies (Outlined by you)

 

 

How Does Voice Messaging for Unpaid Bills Work?

Calling a patient to remind them about an unpaid bill is still a very effective service collections process as well as a proper bad debt recovery method. As that volume of unpaid accounts continues to grow, the task of calling and leaving messages can be a daunting task. Emerald utilizes dialing technology to follow-up with payment reminders for unpaid patient accounts by eliminating the manual effort and expenses normally associated with voice messaging.

The statistics have shown that hospitals without dialing technology and the ability to utilize voice messaging for unpaid medical billing suffer in their collections efforts dramatically. Although, technology alone does not fully address the scheduling and enforcement rules for account eligibility. Emerald understands this and identifies when to call the appropriate accounts at the defined times.

 

Benefits of Voice Messaging

The benefits of voice messaging ensure that calls will be delivered in accordance with your predefined schedule to relieve your staff of these operational burdens. Keep in mind, we will only be sending out voice messaging on appropriately aged accounts that are in the bad debt recovery stage.

  • Call routing capabilities for patients wishing to transfer from a dialer message
  • Text-to-speech engine that delivers messages with the patient’s name and account number
  • Toll-free or local area code numbers are available for Caller ID
  • Creating custom scheduling logic
  • Increasing communication with patients
  • Reducing the cost and time to manually call patient accounts
  • Answering machine or live person detection capabilities

 

 

Taking Advantage of Post-Visit Medicaid EligibilityHospital Medical Billing Service Collections

Post-visit Medicaid eligibility is a fail-safe process that is often overlooked by other hospital medical billing systems. By identifying individual accounts that may be recovered through Medicaid, Emerald is able to return the billing details for processing and reduce your uncompensated care expenses.

It is critical to remember that it is illegal to bill patients as a Medicaid provider in many states for medical treatment covered by Medicaid. This is why our system looks to keep your hospital medical billing compliant while efficiently maximizing the recovery of these uncompensated care expenses by locating patients eligible for Medicaid within the timely limits of filing.

 

 

Do You Know How much Medicaid Money You’re Losing?

For one FQHC client, Emerald AR found over $250k in unbilled Medicaid and that was only in the first 90 days.

Find out how much Medicaid money your hospital is missing out on. Click the button below for a Free Medicaid Eligibility Scan!

FREE MEDICAID SCAN

How Deceased and Probate Processing Works?

In basic terms, deceased and probate processing is the legal process that is utilized to administer the estate of the deceased. This process includes accounting the deceased individual’s assets and and distribution of the collecting on deceased receivables and anyone else entitled to payment from the state.

An estate is held liable for all bills owed, debt, and expenses. Those same expenses must be paid before any remaining assets in an estate are able to be disbursed to any individual in a will. Emerald’s deceased and probate processing service enables hospitals to proactively identify the deceased who still have account balances, find the probated estates, and file claims to receive appropriate compensation. In many bad beds recovery cases, probate processing can be responsible for a considerable portion of outstanding medical billing and service collections accounts for patients.

 

 

How Bankruptcy Processing Benefits Your Hospital

Emerald’s bankruptcy processing service is an efficient system for providing an electronic record of the bankruptcy details to assure that appropriate claims are filed with accuracy and, most importantly, within the required timeframe. The biggest obstacles that arise when dealing with bankruptcy processing for hospital medical billing are accessing up-to-date and accurate information.

The usefulness of this bankruptcy solution is apparent, especially if you don’t currently have a process in place to recovery these accounts. Bankruptcy processing through Emerald is designed to accurately improve the recovery rate claims that are filed in a timely manner. This safeguard ensures that operational efforts are best utilized and reduces wasted time.

It is required to file a proof of claim for this process, but the mishandling of that claim can negatively impact its acceptance by the bankruptcy court. In addition, it can also milit or entirely negate the chances you have of receiving a payout for that claim. Creditors who have filed a “Proof of Claim” that is both timely and accurate with the appropriate bankruptcy court are entitled to a disbursement in any bankruptcy case. Emerald’s bankruptcy service is another valuable addition to your hospital’s medical billing collections efforts for uncompensated care expenses.

 

 

Getting Started With Our Hospital Medical Billing & Service Collections

Emerald partners with our clients to select a proper schedule and corresponding quantity for each service to be delivered. By coordinating with your hospital medical billing services accordingly, we are able to use a single daily exchange to drive efficiency for the process.

Updates

1. We are able to designate patient balance claims for service and then transfer those in a claim batch file. Updates on previously transferred claims are also supplied.

Schedules

2. The service coordinator responsibly schedules actions for multiple services ensuring all services are delivered at the appropriate time without manual intervention. Service delivery is scheduled using the client defined service frequency for the claim segment (i.e. small balance, past due, etc.).

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3. Claim payments are electronically deposited along with a corresponding importable file containing transaction details. Additional service reports contain itemized service detail records and logs.

Whether you’re looking to improve the efficiency of your hospital medical billing or just inquiring about more information, please click on the button below and contact us.

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