Dive Brief:
- The Healthcare Financial Management Association, working with the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals and other industry professionals, has released a new set of best practices for medical debt collection.
- These best practices are designed to improve communication between patients and providers, as well as standardizing and better coordinating all business practices related to medical account resolution.
- For example, the best practices call for developing consistent, coordinated policies for account resolution, so that collection agencies and others follow all of the provider's board-approved policies.
Dive Industry:
In an era when patients are being asked to bear an increasingly large share of their medical bills, and providers are under extreme financial pressure, it makes sense to streamline and coordinate collection practices. You don't have to be a collections expert to see that better communication and clearer expectations can smooth the way on both the consumer and provider ends. Now, let's see how many providers take the trouble to adopt these practices.