What are the top challenges facing small- to medium-sized, independent physicians as they fight to maintain their independence and compete with the large, corporate providers? This month, we are looking at the top 10 challenges, so please join us for this informative series and tune back in every Tuesday! If you’re reading this post first, please go back and read Part 2 from last week and Part 1 from the week before, where we looked at why doctors should even be fighting the battle for independence, as well as challenges one through seven (high insurance claim rejections, slow reimbursements, and clunky, user-unfriendly, overpriced EMR systems, high merchant services costs, scheduling nightmares, struggling with HIPAA and coding compliance, and dealing with old paper files ). Let’s move on to causes eight through ten today!
8) Bad debt. Doctors often hate talking about money. What they hate even more? Chasing it. Nobody likes asking people for money, and doing so aggressively often alienates patients. But it’s hard enough operating a profitable practice without having tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars in bad debt. That’s why we offer QuickCollect, a soft approach to collecting from patients, and one that allows you to maintain full visibility and control. Eighty percent of all patients who ever will pay, do pay through this process. It relieves your staff from this troublesome burden but without doing traditional collections, which has a low success rate.
9) Marketing. Large, corporate providers have marketing budgets in the six- to seven-figure range. How can a smaller provider compete with that? Again, we bring technology to the table to solve a problem. We offer AutoCard, an automated mailer marketing service to help doctors stay in touch with their patient base and even market to prospective patients. In an age when it seems that most emails are ignored and/or go to the spam folder, physical mailers are the new email. It’s both affordable and effective.
10) Verifying benefits. You often find even smaller practices dedicating up to half a headcount solely to this task. That number should be exactly ZERO. With the right technology, you should have this process fully automated. Our iClaim solution solves benefits verifications with the push of a single button. No more phone calls, no more chasing. And that also means fewer denials.
So how successfully is YOUR practice facing these challenges? If you could use help, contact us today to set up a free, no-obligation, 30-minute practice analysis. We will either show you how we will add more value than we cost, or we simply won’t ask for your business.