January 13, 2016 Ask Owen

3 Techniques for Minimizing Accounts Receivable

It doesn’t really matter if you are managing your accounts receivable well; revisiting them from time to time may yield you more cash. After all, cash flow helps your business to run smoothly and without any hiccups.

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Let’s give you three tips through which you can maximize your return on accounts receivable.

Purge old data

Sometimes, it is not enough to ask your front desk staff to collect contact information and insurance from new patients. You should instead ask your staff to revalidate the information at their every visit and make changes in the system.

Once you have the entire data up to date, take a closer look at it. It is not important to keep data of patients who have left your practice long ago. Get rid of such data and then move on to new patients.

It is also a good idea to mark missed co-pays from a deceased patient or vaccine reimbursements from an out-of-business payer as losses instead of spending time, effort and money to continually bill them.

Collect from recurring patients

It is absolutely important that you collect any outstanding balances from your recurring patients and try not to let the Accounts Receivable swell further. Generally, patients keep coming in and are often let off the hook without payments at their visits. Try to collect existing balances at their next visits and mark them off your to-do list.

You should ideally have your front desk staff to do this for you before they confirm the appointments a day before. They should check for patients with outstanding balances and inform them of their debts. This will help the front desk in securing payments when such patients come in.

Run reports on collection trends

One of the most important tools in minimizing your Accounts Receivable is to run periodic reports to check your collection trends. See your average A/R days through the analytic provided by your practice management system. Remember, proper reporting identifies areas of weaknesses in your revenue cycle for you to work on.

These are some of the techniques which if you follow, will help you maximize your Accounts Receivables and keep your cash flow smooth.

This article originally appeared here.

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