Dive Brief:
- Hospital debt is clearly a big problem: US hospitals lost $41.1 billion on bad debt and charity care in 2011.
- Hoping to buck this trend, 19-hospital Adventist Health system of Roseville,Calif.recently rolled out point of care collections systems across 17 of its sites.
- The software, which creates detailed patient responsibility estimates, has raised collections by $2.2 million over the last year, and expects to see an added $5 million to $6 million annually in the future.
Dive Insight:
It's a tried-and-true principle that once a patient walks out your hospital or medical practice door, collecting from them is a lot tougher. So it's not much of a surprise that the hospital collected more when it asked patients for dollars while they were still on-site. But as corporate registration manager Gary Friestad told Healthcare IT News, the new software -- a MedeAnalytics patient access solution -- is a tool, not magic. Hospitals that hope to follow in Adventist's footsteps will have to do a lot of training and customization, he warns. Still, it's good to see a hospital cracking this nut one way or the other.