5 proven techniques to reduce your AR aging days

Improving your accounts receivable in healthcare necessitates active management of your revenue cycle as well as the elimination of any inefficiencies in your processes. In fact, putting effort into optimizing administration, running AR reports, and tracking claims helps you to recover revenue that would otherwise be lost and reduce your AR aging days.

Have your Ageing Accounts Receivable begun to accumulate?

You might want to consider outsourcing reimbursement collection to a revenue cycle management (RCM) company. Let's get started.

What exactly is an Account Receivable?

A medical account receivable is the outstanding reimbursement owed to providers for issued treatments and services, regardless of whether the patient is financially responsible or their insurance company is. Healthcare service providers must stay on top of efforts to collect accounts receivable reimbursement.

The longer an Accounts Recievable goes unpaid, the less likely it is that healthcare providers will receive payment at all, i.e., after 120 days, clinicians can expect only ten cents on the dollar.

Ongoing Obstacles to Achieving Short AR Turnaround—the ACA

Following the Affordable Care Act, many Americans enrolled in high-deductible plans in order to reduce their monthly expenses. However, many patients will be responsible for a higher percentage of their medical bills as a result of this option.

Recovering reimbursements from individual patients places a greater burden on the AR processes of medical providers. Providers must deal with missed collections during visits, people delaying payments due to financial difficulties, the unpredictability of AR duration, and other issues.

Strategies to Improve your AR aging days

When inefficiencies and oversights in processes go unaddressed, ARs begin to accumulate, age, and turn into revenue leakage. That’s why there is a need to opt for the following strategies:

Set Expectations for Payment

Providers can reduce delinquent payments by setting financial expectations for patients ahead of scheduled visits. Furthermore, providers who do not make a concerted effort to collect patient copays before patients leave care settings enhances the risk for losing revenue. When patients do not pay right away after their appointments, providers are 20% less likely to collect reimbursements.

Collect Patient Portions Promptly

Collecting immediate payment from patients expedites the completion of one portion of the AR cycle and simplifies tracking efforts further along the AR cycle. Integrate prompt collection with release processes, as hospitals write off nearly half of all patient financial responsibility as bad debt.

Even if patients are unable to pay their portion of the bill immediately after receiving care, providers should consider offering partial payment plans to lock in some reimbursement and establish an easily traceable schedule.

Charge Entry

Incorrect charge entry has an impact on providers' bottom lines. According to research, up to 1% of net charges are incorrectly captured due to discrepancies between documentation and billed services or missed charges. While a 1% loss may appear to be acceptable, a hospital with yearly revenue of $250 million stands to lose $2.5 million due to administrative errors. The healthcare providers must keep a track of thousands of healthcare codes for various procedure charges to avoid revenue leakages and risk audit penalties.

Submission of Claims

After providers have captured and coded charges, they must submit claims to payors and patients in order to be reimbursed. Charge entry errors and inaccuracies in patient information on submitted claims result in claim denial and extended AR cycles. In addition to bridging the gap between care and reimbursement, resubmitting claims raises staff costs.

When patients have additional insurance coverage, submitting claims for Medicare reimbursement becomes even more difficult. Providers must keep track of:

• The patient's supplemental insurance information, as well as whether or not the coverage is still in effect.
• That the supplemental insurer received the correct Medicare bill.

AR Tracking

Tracking your accounts receivable on a monthly basis provides providers with the information they need to determine those who are at risk of becoming leaked revenue and contributing to bad debt. Providers can compare ARs over time to identify potentially dangerous trends and identify any outstanding reimbursements that may be simple to close.

 Providers should examine their account receivable data to decide about collection rates and aged debtors. 

Reduce your AR aging days with 24/7 Medical Billing Services

Now, it’s quite clear that unpaid claim research is a time-consuming process that can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour per claim.

And, the best solution to deal with such a hectic task is outsourcing medical billing and coding services.

When you use a dedicated medical billing services from the professional medical billing company like 24/7 Medical Billing Services, you have a team of experts working on your AR cleanup and insurance follow-up on a daily basis.

The team will review your AR and ageing claims to determine why open balances remain unpaid, analyze the reasons, take the necessary steps to recover the amount owed, verify receipt of claims with insurance companies, and enter the claims into your practice management system—cleaning up your AR.

Read more: Choosing The Best Outsourcing Medical Billing Companies In 2022