Taking ONE real-life client as an example.
Week ending Friday, January 31st: out of 15 consultations, 4 (four) came back with excess deductions £575.
So for a total of £2,500 worth of revenue from outpatient consultations £575 or 23% came back short.
Looking back to the same week in 2019, the number of excess was roughly half this.
The question as to why this is happening is not the concern.
The concern is what are you going to do about it.
If 23% continues the downside and potential loss to the consultant is significant.
There is only one real way to resolve this issue. Phone them!
Phone them.
Sure you can write letters and even email but nothing gets a response like a ringing telephone.
Most patients claim to be unaware of the issue but some think this is an issue between them and their insurance company.
In other words, the patient thinks they need to pay the insurance company.
They think the consultant gets paid in full by the insurance company.
There are variations on this but the crucial point for the consultant is not to establish why; its to ensure he recovers the excess efficiently.
But if telephoning the patient is the most efficient way to tackle the issue, it does not automatically follow its the easiest.
It has to be done professionally and with due diligence.
The long-suffering med-sec really won’t have the time to do this as professional and caring as she undoubtedly is.
I promise you faithfully, she won’t want to phone patients for money and will be thinking this is the least enjoyable part of her job.
There is an alternative though: do nothing.
Some patients actually will pay but this assumes they a) are aware of the excess and b) make it good straight away.
Doing Nothing
What if they don’t?
Assume it’s not £575 or 23% a week or £27.6k a year (£575 multiplied by 48 – not 52 weeks as you will have 4 weeks off a year).
Assume instead its 10% for 24 weeks (i.e. roughly half of the current numbers) and allows for some patients paying without being contacted.
The potential losses for the consultant, in this case, reduce to £13,800 per annum.
That’s a chunk of change in anybody’s book.
What’s significant is that at a number of client meetings recently I’ve asked what the client considered the biggest threat to the practice during 2020.
Most popular was a further reduction in private insurance fees.
That may indeed turn out to be a big problem.
But at this point, empirical evidence suggests its potentially leaving the back door wide open so to speak and enduring £13,800 worth of potential losses right off the bottom line.
I’d be really interested to hear from anyone who is seeing an increase in excess and their views on remedies.
pete@medicalhealthcaremanagement.co.uk