Doing a better job of Collections

Hi, this is Dave Kats, therapist consultants and I have a tip for you.

The last few weeks, we've been talking about how to build your practice, we said there's only four major ways, get more new patients, see more patient visits, provide more services, or do a good a better job in collections. Today, I want to talk about the last one doing a better job in collections. Every month, if you're especially if you're an insurance practitioner, but even if you're a cash practitioner, you should go to your software and run aging of accounts. Now, an aging of accounts is simply a report that tells you who owes you money, and how long they have owed that money to you.

If you look at that, and then you have only two or three decisions you can make, you can either resubmit it to the insurance company if you file insurance, or you can write it off, or you can send the patient the remainder of the bill, but you can't let time go on too long before you run an aging of accounts. I got a funny story got to tell you. We said to one therapist, what's your accounts receivable, and he said, I don't know exactly what you mean by cash receivable. We said what people owe you. He said, Oh, they don't only much he said, they pretty much pay as they go and I collect the rest from an insurance.

We had him running an aging of accounts. $240,000 was outstanding. $240,000. Pretty unusual. You have to run an aging of accounts, see what people owe you because we get too old like without it you're going to be writing a lot of it off. Every month, run an aging of accounts report, an aging report. Then make sure that you're looking at those things as a month goes on, get through the whole list, and decide what to do with each one. Once you get it done to two or three months, it'll be easy to do after that but that's one of the best ways you can do best things you can do to increase your collections run an aging of accounts and every software every billing software, known to mankind in therapy will have the capacity to running aging of reports.

This is Dave Kats. Thanks for listening.