Healthcare Providers Decrease Bad Debt with nTelagent?s Self-Pay System

As the focus of healthcare collections moves from post-service to pre-access/point of service, nTelagent, Inc.’s proprietary front-end business solution, the Self-Pay Management System (SPMS), helps providers to better manage self-pay accounts and upfront collections, more accurately determine patient ability to pay, and effectively tackle the growing problem of bad debt.

“Simply put, improving front-end revenue cycle operations can help providers better manage bad debt,” says Earl T. Winter, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of nTelagent. “Due to the ever-increasing number of self-pay patients, providers can no longer rely on the certainty of payments from private insurance companies or government programs. If hospitals and other providers want to ensure a successful future, collections procedures must be altered to account for this trend.”

Since the advent of health insurance options, including private insurance, Medicare and Medicaid, the focus of collections for healthcare service providers has been on the back end, at post-service. Recent trends — such as increases in co-pays, coinsurance and deductibles for traditional insurance plans and the creation of consumer-driven health plans such as health reimbursement arrangements and health savings accounts — have shifted more financial responsibility to the individual patient. Compounding the need to focus more on upfront collections are the more than 49 million uninsured and 16 million underinsured Americans.

For more information on this topic, download the White Paper “From the Back to the Front: The Current Evolution of Healthcare Collections” from nTelagent’s website, www.ntelagent.com.
 
nTelagent’s Self-Pay Management System harnesses proven web-based technology to address the challenges of accurately and consistently handling self-pay accounts on the front end, increasing upfront and overall collections and reducing bad debt. Specifically, SPMS integrates patient demographic information with each provider’s unique business policies, helping providers to predict payment probability and to determine which collection efforts are most productive.

“With 12% of total health spending now out of pocket, as opposed to payments coming from traditional insurance providers, there is a clear, urgent need to more effectively deal with self-pay accounts,” continues Winter. “Self-pay patients are responsible for the majority of uncompensated care, yet most healthcare organizations lack the necessary tools and technology to optimize self-pay collections. By some estimates, at the time of service hospitals only collect 25% or less of the payment due. Our system gives providers the tools they need to predict whether a patient will pay his or her bill, helping them to tailor their collections approach according to this probability.”

In addition to improving upfront collections, SPMS streamlines pre-service and point-of-service efforts to qualify patients for charity care and government programs — and ensures that charity practices are implemented consistently and documented appropriately. For everyone’s benefit, patients who qualify for charity discount programs can be enrolled in them right away, on the front end, saving both parties time and money.

With nTelagent’s Self-Pay Management System in place, healthcare service providers can:

   1. Determine patient responsibility for both uninsured and insured patients, including insurance verification, co-pays and deductibles
   2. Address patient financial and demographic verification and consistently apply discounting and charity policies
   3. Provide online scripting for registrars and financial counselors, instructing them of the exact steps to be taken with each patient
   4. Enable pricing transparency and medical financing options
   5. Provide real-time information on an individual’s capacity to pay

About nTelagent, Inc.
nTelagent, a Nashville, Tenn.-based company, enables healthcare service providers to revolutionize the way they interact with patients regarding patient responsibilities at the point of service, including offering price transparency and medical financing options. The company’s Self-Pay Management System increases upfront cash and overall collections by providing registrars and financial counselors with interactive scripts that integrate patient demographic information with each provider’s unique business policies and rules. The system automatically identifies discounting and charity care options when applicable, and helps to ensure that patient financial accounting — for both insured and uninsured patients — is handled appropriately and in a non-discriminatory manner. For healthcare providers, nTelagent’s system improves upfront and overall cash flow, receivables and profitability by reducing bad debt and improving the revenue cycle process for patients who must pay a portion of the bill through payment requirements, such as co-pays, co-insurance and deductibles. Visit nTelagent online at www.ntelagent.com to learn more.