Payment Plans Made Easy
Kathy Mills Chang
MCS-P, CCPC, CCCA
Systems within the chiropractic practice must rely on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. One area many practices overlook is installing payment plans. If you aren’t already, it’s time to provide your patients with the benefit of a structured plan for payment. By helping them budget for care, you’ll find they are more able to comfortably continue care without the burden of the financial unknown. Many patients can work their chiropractic care into the household budget if given the option. In turn, practices that take the next logical step of automating payment plans feel a freedom from insurance dependence and avoid the various time-of-service payment obstacles.
When the front desk CA has to collect from every patient seen on a given day—whether full payment or copayments, it amounts to multiple separate entries in your software. Then these items must be balanced and deposited at day’s end, which involves more petty cash tracking and additional steps in general. Furthermore, for example, if 40 to 50 patients stop at the front
desk to pay, that also means there are 40 to 50 opportunities in which they consider continuing care each time they pull out their wallet.
The biggest and best reason to automate payment plans is to allow your patients to receive the care they need, particularly when a $40+ copayment three times per week might not allow them to do so.
Any number of circumstances may lead patients to question continuing care in your office. The simplest example is that when their pain subsides, they assume they no longer need care. Patients often judge their need for care based upon the absence of pain. As we all know, pain is typically the last symptom to appear, but the first symptom to go away. When patients lose insurance or run out of annual coverage, they may make a financial decision to discontinue care rather than continue to receive necessary treatment while paying out of pocket. These issues are easily resolved by estimating patient responsibility for the care recommended and
then breaking that responsibility into affordable, legal, and compliant payment options. If offered and explained well, most patients are happy to choose one of these budget-friendly payment options:
• An appropriate prepayment plan managed in accordance with your state law that delivers a small discount incentive on the noninsurance portion
• A reasonable down payment toward estimated financial responsibility plus manageable monthly payments until the balance is zero
• Convenient and automated monthly payments applied to the balance managed directly with auto-draft from a credit card
When patients have no choice other than to think about paying for care, patient retention falls. Money remains one of greatest concerns on your patients’ minds, often affecting treatment because of money worries. Understanding patient concerns and implementing these simple steps will assist you with the installation of an effective, automated payment plan in your practice:
1. Manage each patient’s expectations from the beginning of care. Is your patient insured? Step one is to gain a solid understanding of the quoted insurance benefits in order to estimate the patient’s responsibility. Include copayments, coinsurance, deductibles, and any noncovered services before you attempt to create a financial plan acceptable and helpful for your patients.
2. Ensure your patient understands the recommended treatment plan in terms of time and content. After the treatment plan is explained by the doctor, the patient’s estimated financial responsibility should follow immediately, often explained by a financial CA. Offer legal discounts for the self-pay portion of the care plan, perhaps by using a discount medical plan organization (DMPO). Be sure to estimate all of the recommended care, not only the portion covered by insurance.
3. Once a plan is chosen, it is crucial to create a payment plan for your patients that is easy to use for your patients and your practice. Automating your patients’ payments in your practice means they will have a set amount agreed upon to be charged each month. These charges will be
charged to a credit card, which you keep in a PCI-compliant, secure system on file. This manner eliminates the need to constantly remind the patient of the payments, and team members don’t need to keep track of those who need to pay. If your patient wants to pay at each visit, keep the credit card on file with his or her signature authorization, so each time the patient visits, you can access the account and charge the card on file. In the office, you probably already perform a similar process for insurance. You don’t ask your patients to give you their insurance card at each visit, do you? You simply have the card on file and automatically bill the insurance for the services rendered.
4.Ensure your practice receives the maximum benefit from the automated payment by using a reputable system to manage the process, like the Cash Practice System (www.cashpractice.com). Gone are the days when the office kept a file box filled with cards containing each patient’s credit card number in writing. Now, your system must have all of the components necessary to meet your practice’s needs. Most importantly, it must be payment card industry (PCI)-compliant, a mandatory requirement for auto-debit systems. Merchants at every level are required to follow the standards of PCI to ensure cardholder data remains protected, reducing the risk of credit card fraud and allowing patients to feel secure.
It’s unreasonable to assume patients can always afford to get all of the recommended care and be able to pay in full at every visit along the way. Payment plans can transform your practice and your collections. Furthermore, automating your patients’ payments brings order to often chaotic front desk collections, frees up valuable front desk CA time, minimizes the risk of collectionsrelated errors, and helps patients feel confident in your practice as they receive the care they need.
Kathy Mills Chang is a certified medical compliance specialist (MCS-P) and certified chiropractic professional coder (CCPC). Since 1983, she has provided chiropractors with reimbursement and compliance training, advice, and tools to improve the financial performance of their practices. Kathy leads a team of 30 at KMC University and is known as one of our profession’s foremost experts on documentation, Medicare, and billing and collections. She or any of her team members can be reached at 855832-6562 or [email protected].
