Once you have made the decision to outsource your practice’s healthcare accounts receivable or medical collections, determining the best company to handle these processes most effectively can be hard work. Following are a few key questions to consider, ensuring that the company you choose to work with is a good match.
What are your practice’s needs? One of the advantages of outsourcing is that vendors can provide sufficient staff resources to get claims and billing tasks processed more quickly, regardless of employees being out sick or on vacation. Make sure that the vendor understands your practice’s needs and expectations and that they can deliver on promises made.
Will the vendor provide regular progress reports? Just because you choose to outsource certain administrative tasks, it doesn’t mean that you are going to let someone else have free reign without accountability. Ask your vendor for weekly or monthly reports so that you can track their progress and success rates. Keep in mind that it could be a couple of months before you start seeing significant improvement in your practice’s healthcare accounts receivable.
Will you have access to their system for monitoring? Whether you choose to outsource your entire medical collections department or just a few tasks, if the vendor is in contact with patients or oversees processes affecting your practice’s revenue, you should be able to access their system in order to check their progress. Experienced revenue cycle partners at AR Logix, for example, record all phone calls with patients and make the recordings available for quality assurance purposes.
Does the vendor have satisfied clients? Find out who the vendor has worked with in the past, check their references, and make sure that most (or all) of their customers have been happy with their services. Don’t just base your decision on the list of customers the vendor provides you with. Do some digging on your own to see if anyone has given them negative reviews online.
