Yes, it is time to place accounts with a collection agency!

Why would a company hire an employee to collect accounts?

Why would a company keep mailing letters to patients that have not paid you?

Why would a company keep stretching internal resources to pursue unpaid patient accounts?

The answer is simple they just don't know any better.

Hiring an employee to collect is financially unsound since we are talking about patients who have not paid and may not even be willing to pay. So this new persons salary can not be totally based on what you expect them to be able to collect from these patients as that would be an unwise expectation for funding. Add the cost to have a staff member train this person and any health insurance benefits and you just created overhead instead of collecting debts.

A collection agency would work on a contingency basis and would only get paid if they collected the funds.

Continuing to spend money on postage stamps and envelopes and sending letters to patients that have not paid is another bad business practice. If you had a 1,000 patients that have not paid their bill and you send them 3 letters in a 90 day period of time at .44 cents a piece you just spent $1,320.00. How many letters will be mail returned do to bad addresses or the fact the patient has moved.

Most collection agencies have the ability to locate patients via skip tracing and they are mandatorily mandated to send collection letters. I suggest that any savvy business person would let the collection agency incur the mailing costs thereby removing that expense once and for all.

How much time does your staff have to call these patients that have not paid? How much time will it take them to talk to each patient and listen through the patients objections to paying and then try to reach some resolution and then still try to get their daily work load completed. One word "Impossible" it is just too much and your business will suffer because you tried to turn a person with a background as an insurance biller into a bill collector.

Collection agencies usually have the best debt negotiators as well as the the technology such as autodialers to handle large volumes of collection calls. There is just no comparison between your internal staffs capabilites and a collection agency to contact and communicate consistantly with a patient about their delinquent accounts.

Collection agencies have evolved into fine tuned machines that have to comply with both state and federal laws as well as each clients personal criteria to stay in business.

Hopefully you now realize just how important it is that you get your unpaid medical accounts to a good collection agency like www.allmedicaldebt.com as soon as possible.
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