Hospital Vendor Winnows Out Bad Debt with Calling Technology

No creditor or collector likes wasting time or money calling a debtor who can’t afford to pay a bill. Now, a healthcare services provider has teamed with a technology firm to better categorize those debtors that can, and can’t, pay their medical bills.

Human ARC is helping eliminate unnecessary calls for Ohio hospitals and the collection agencies that represent them by identifying patients who qualify for government assistance and charity care.

Privately held Human ARC, which has 300 employees, also provides claims and receivables management services. But the business was founded on determining the patients that are Medicaid eligible, said Sheldon Pratt, director of disproportionate share services at the company. Human ARC does so by reaching out to patients who hospitals have categorized as non-paying bad debt, or soon to be bad debt.

“It’s a last bite at the apple to get the account deemed to be charity instead of bad debt,” he said.

Cleveland-based Human ARC also assists hospitals by determining those patients who qualify for charity care and those who are eligible for additional government assistance. The hospital earns a tax benefit for its charity care, and its claims office can efficiently pursue the debt that is collectible. Pratt said that Human ARC’s work allows the hospital to earn its fair share of the Medicaid dollars that Ohio allocates for treatment of low-income and charity-care patients.

Continued cuts to state Medicaid programs could make Human ARC services more valuable, as hospitals encounter rising uncompensated care expenses, including unpaid bills from uninsured patients.

To increase contact and application rates with Medicaid and charity-care eligible patients, Human ARC recently began using new technology from LiveVox, Pratt said. LiveVox is a San Francisco based on-demand voice portal company serving the collections and billings and call center industries. LiveVox’s Web-based hosted dialing service eliminates the need to buy or lease specialized dialing equipment and offers “quick connect” capability that allows clients to program software so no calls are generated before an agent is available to take the call, Pratt said.

Since adding the quick connect service a month ago, Human ARC’s 10-man shop devoted to its disproportionate share services business is generating 7,500 calls in an eight-hour shift, as opposed to 3,000 on a pure manual (dialing) shift, Pratt said, adding that productively is up about 25 percent.

“We’ve increased applications taken from 4.5 applications per employee an hour to 5.2 applications per employee,” Pratt said.

Human ARC said it is looking to expand its disproportionate business to other states that offer a Medicaid reimbursement model similar to Ohio’s practice of tying reimbursements to service for low-income patients.

Nonetheless, LiveVox’s dialing service platform will allow Human ARC and other call center businesses to undertake a variety of operations without buying specialized equipment, said Louis Summe, chief executive of LiveVox. He envisions the company’s Web-hosting services will one day merge telephone dialing services with the Internet, allowing the debtor and the agent to simultaneously view the debtor’s account online.

“It’s not a feature we offer today,” Summe said. “But as people like Human ARC use our service these types of features become possible.”