Close to half of Brickell Research customers have practices with significant elective care revenue. Unsurprisingly, the importance of effective up-front collections (whether in "cash" or through through financing arrangements) never seems to be lost on practices when it comes to elective care services or retail product sales. On the other hand, the same can rarely be said of processes surrounding insurance-based services. Although many practices seem to have an established routine surrounding patient co-payment collection, in a world where high-deductible health plans are increasingly common, it is all the more important to understand that, on average, not collecting funds that might be collectable at the time of service (or before) has been correlated with lower long-term revenue in several studies.

In other words, if the amount due at the time of service is knowable, and the choice is made to wait to address patient responsibility until after the carrier responds to an insurance claim submission, on average a significant portion of the funds due from patients will go uncollected long-term.

There are several ways to empower both your billing and front-office staff to improve up-front collections and, as a result, your practice's overall bottom-line performance without significantly adding to their workload. The first of these- approaches to timely, efficient eligibility checking- will be the subject of the our post.

Brickell Research is happy to announce an upcoming white paper and video series by Brickell Research president Peter Legorburu toward dispelling the costly myths and confusion being sown by many integrated PM/EMR system vendors. The presentations and white papers aim to help practices cut through the hype, protect current investments in EMR and practice management systems and deal with avoidable business risks associated with monolithic solutions.