Many providers are leaving some portion of unresolved insurance accounts untouched due to staffing shortfalls, budget constraints or simply an influx of volume. If left unworked, those accounts will age out, become less collectable over time and eventually be written off to bad debt.
Providers not working AR every 30 days should engage an outside revenue cycle team to assist in recovering cash from that AR before it is lost to bad debt. The financial reward to the organization will more than offset the cost.
The Strategy
Recently, Meduit worked with a midsized regional hospital that was under-resourced in their business office due to lack of qualified AR resolution employees available in their local marketplace. A segmentation of their AR revealed that once accounts reached 120+ days, the hospital staff was only working 2% of the accounts each month and collecting 15%, which equated to nearly $300,000 per month in collections.
Because the hospital had a chronic problem of unworked AR on accounts older than 120 days, without a strategy to reverse this trend, the hospital eventually would have been forced to write off the bulk of the inventory to either a contractual or bad debt.
Results
In the first 30 days, Meduit worked the 120+ accounts and increased collections by five times or nearly $1.5 million per month, with similar result trends projected for the following 60 to 90-day time period post go-live. While it did cost the hospital money to outsource the AR, the total return was greater than $1 million per month when compared to prior levels of cash/revenue generation on AR older than 120 days.
You can download the white paper here to learn more about how Meduit helps hospitals, health systems and large physician groups resolve aged AR before it is written off to bad debt.
