GroupOne Revenue Cycle Blog 

With the increasing number of high-deductible health plans, optimizing your revenue cycle management for patient pay collections is no longer a matter of if, but when. These 12 eye-opening patient pay and healthcare payment market statistics are sure to convince you that focusing your revenue cycle efforts on patient pay collections is worthwhile.

Today the average practice has up to 35% of their revenue coming from patient pay but 81% of self-pay revenues go uncollected. It's no wonder that practices today are turning to credit card on file programs to solve the challenges of patient pay collections. 

Patient payments are a vital part of revenue cycle management, but when patients fail to take financial responsibility, doctors and their practices take a hard hit. In fact, according to a report from the American Hospital Association —  since 2000 —  U.S. hospitals have provided more than $502 billion in uncompensated care expenses. More patients are paying higher out-of-pocket costs for medical care expenses than ever before. Here are top ways your practice can increase patient payments that boost your practice's revenue.

Although it's considered best practice to collect co-payments at the time of service, things don't always happen that way. Sometimes your office is understaffed, or the patient doesn't have the co-payment required, or another issue may arise that prevents collections from happening on the date of service. If this becomes a habit, however, then you are setting yourself and your practice up for long term collection and medical billing issues.

With more and more patients moving to a high deductible health insurance plan, it is becoming increasingly important to make sure that those patients pay their deductibles on time and in full. Though a portion (ideally no higher than 4 to 6%) will become bad debt and be written off, to keep your practice healthy, you will need to encourage your patients to pay these deductibles and make that payment process easy and as pain-free as possible.

Today, high-deductible insurance plans are more and more standard for patients. According to a recent report from InstaMed, 74 percent of healthcare providers reported an increase in patient financial responsibility in 2015, which has prompted healthcare revenue cycle management strategies to focus more on consumers. This reality makes collections that much more difficult, and practices often encounter patients “forgetting” their checkbooks or credit cards at the time of service.