Case Study on Finances in the Medical Field

This week in my case study I will be discussing how medial practices are able to gather forms of payment from self- pay patients prior to any services rendered. In California, Sutter Health was committed to giving patient financial services staff who worked both front and back end, the necessary tools to improve the way they collected monies from patients before being seen. With the approach that the Sutter was bringing to the table, in the first three months, they had seen a decrease in accounts receivable in the region for nine hospitals.

Souza, M. & McCarty, B. (2007). From bottom to top: How one provider retooled its collections [Electronic version]. Healthcare Financial Management, 61(9), 67-73.

In the article, From the bottom to the top: How one provider retooled its collections is about how Sutter Health in California, improved the approach on how to collect payments from those patients who self-pay without any health insurance. Before Sutter implemented the new program, they did come across some problems that needed to be addressed. One being, that the patient financial services staff didn’t have access to information regarding their collections which, caused them to wait to the end of the month to set benchmarks and make important business decisions. Second being that the accounting system in the hospital didn’t allow managers to isolate and analyze select data or generate report on demand. This article will help my paper out by giving information about the success that Sutter had after implementing their new system that allows them to effectively take payments.

Improving financial services for the uninsured. (2008). Healthcare Financial Management: Journal Of The Healthcare Management Association, 62(9), 133-134.

In the article, Improving financial services for the uninsured is about a system that was not able to include patients in its charity care program due to the patients not being able to meet paperwork requirements. The organization started using automation that accessed the industries source data to substantiate a patient’s financial status, with this being, this allowed a lot of patients to be able to enroll in charity care, help drop bad debt by 50 percent, and cut the time spent in charity care enrollment by more than half. With technology advancing so much today it has help this health system to help determine soon whether a patient is able to a pay a bill well by doing a payment assessment.

Reporting and analysis helped improve the workflow involved when clearing accounts and measuring progress toward goals. This article will help my paper because it has information on how the system improved to help identify such patients with paying difficulties.

Mountford, G., Smith, J., & Todd, J. (2005). Dealing with self-pay patients – compassionately.

Hfm (Helathcare Financial Mangement), 59(15), 68-74

This article is discusses how to deal with patients who are self-pay with compassion. Stevens Hospital, in Edmonds, Washington, discovered a way to help it receive more of the monies due to it for the services provided. The hospital was facing reduced revenues from self-pay patients and less than satisfactory collections of copays and deductibles.

Making changes that overhauled its preregistration and registration process, the hospital has been able to reduce denials and increase net revenues. This article will help my paper, because it discusses the process that this Stevens Hospital did to make it more effective for the hospital and the patients.

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