Page 39 - HME Business, October 2019

that are out there,” Gehring says. “Because of the reimbursements, the reality to the provider is the profit that they have in that product is in the patient pay.”
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And yet, “Patient pay is probably the last
priority on the list of things to do. [DMEs] are
looking at ‘if I don’t get paid by the insurer,
there’s no business.’ So they are focused on
“A lot of what
we come across
is companies
that do not
have finalized
escalation
procedures. They have processes that never come to a conclusion” – Joey Graham, Prochant
Management Solutions | Technology | Products
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that later? How many claims later are we creating that? What the insurance company is hoping is that you won’t get back to it.”
“A lot of what we come across is companies that do not have finalized escalation procedures. They have processes that never come to conclu- sion if things don’t go right,” Graham says. He uses the example of a prescription that is out
for signature from the doctor, but after several efforts it still never arrives. “The provider throws up their hands and moves on. Nobody ever wants to pull the trigger on making a decision.”
Like Prochant, WellSky and A Perfect Billing Service, many billing services do only public and insurance payer management, so you can choose a service to manage institutional billing but deal with your patients personally.
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“We process the payment up to the patient, then the provider handles that. A lot of that is tied to referral sources and we don’t want to make any referral sources mad,” says Minnich. “The patient portion is dealing with a whole different set of rules – you are basically a collec- tion agency. The DME provider has the rela- tionship with the patient. We explain it to the provider and they explain it to the patient.” One encouraging hint she offers for dealing with tardy patient payments: “A lot of times it improves collections 70 percent to 80 percent just calling them.”
If you prefer to have a service do patient collections, services like Allegiance Group focus exclusively on patient pay, others like Brightree Services have divisions that do.
RX 3: PATIENT PAY PAINS
This may be a shock treatment. Maybe you got started in DME in the Golden Commode era, when you could let a patient co-pay slide, but now you have to tell longtime customers to pay up.
‘The whole attitude about ‘don’t worry about the co-pay’ – now the co-pays are what you have to collect because of the high deductibles
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