Collection Policy, Part 5: How to Use Your Collection KPIs

It’s important to know how to use your collection KPIs once you have launched your collections policy. Review your key performance indicators (KPIs) on a regular basis. By keeping an eye on your trends, you will know if you need to adjust your policy or procedures. Here are some examples:

• You discover your days sales outstanding (DSO) is more than 50 days. According to your policy, you are sending out two invoices during the first 45 days. You may want to adjust your policy by adding a reminder call between the invoices to help collect the balance sooner.
• Last month, 25 percent of your accounts receivable were more than 120 days old. Your policy dictates you keep the accounts for 150 days. Consider reducing how long you want to keep the accounts before turning them over to the agency.
• Payment Reports indicate your intake staff is not collecting payment information upfront as outlined in the policy. Consider more training and review the collection policy with your staff.

Following process improvement guidelines, after you make the adjustments you will want to verify your results are improving. If they are not, continue to fine-tine your processes and repeat the cycle.

Where to turn for help

As the patient responsibility and patient A/R balances continue to rise, patient collections will play an even more important role to your company’s cash flow. Creating a collection policy will help streamline your billing and collections process. If you stumbled on this article on its own – we have several other free resources available to you to help create your policy. You can view all of them on our blog or click on this link and share your email with us. We’ll share the entire 8-part series with you. The series covers everything from start to finish on creating and implementing a collection policy.

Creating a collection policy is taking an important step to proactively improve your cash flow. We can help you get started by providing an example of a patient invoice workflow and a collection policy template. If you need help communicating your policy, our blog shares tactics we have used in the past.

Outsourcing

Providers may start handling their collections in-house, but many will eventually outgrow their capacity. If you are considering outsourcing your A/R collections, your partner should be able to incorporate your collection policies and provide the reporting you need to stay on top of the process. You’ll also find that most outsourcing partners appreciate clients who have workflows outlining their processes and know how they want their patient accounts managed.

Regardless of the way that your patient A/R gets processed, in-house or through a partner, knowing how to use your collection KPIs and monitoring your accounts receivable will help you ensure your business has the cash it needs to meet its financial obligations.