Every practice could use a new income stream, but nobody wants to squeeze in more appointments per provider each day or extend their hours. One way to optimize income while maintaining your existing schedule is by plugging up revenue leakage.

Check out three types of revenue leakage your practice may be experiencing, along with tips on how to plug those leaks.

1. An Overly Generous Front Desk Team

Your front desk staff has likely heard every possible excuse from patients who don’t want to pay at the time of the visit. And everyone at your front desk has empathy and emotions, so they may be susceptible to being overly generous when they hear a particularly compelling story. But if you want to plug revenue leakage, you’ll need to use new methods to guarantee you can collect from patients before they walk out the door. One way to do that is to blame others.

That may sound unusual, but it’s a method that actually works. If a patient says they can’t pay their copay on the date of the visit, blame the payer. For instance, “I’m afraid your insurance company requires us to collect copayments at the time of service.” Or if the patient asks you if they can figure out how to pay for a self-pay service later, blame your accountant. For example, “Our accounting reps won’t allow us to carry amounts that high on our books.”

This way, the patient won’t try and convince you to let them leave without paying, since you’ve made it clear that you aren’t the one preventing that from happening.

2. Lack of Staff Retraining

You likely train your staff members when you hire them, but if you don’t follow up with retraining opportunities, revenue leakage can easily occur. One way to combat this is to document everything you find during your self-audits. It’s important to make a list of:

• Claim denials
• Failure to appeal
• Failure to collect patient-pay amounts
• Missing signed financial policy agreements from patients
• Missing advanced beneficiary notices (ABNs)

Once you find out whether any of these problems are occurring at your practice, create a presentation for your staff and retrain them about how to avoid making these mistakes going forward.

3. Prioritizing Low-Value Collections

Some practices think they’re doing a good job seeking revenue leakage because they spend hours chasing down even the lowest-value collection amounts from patients. But when working denials and collections, it’s a good idea to prioritize your highest-value amounts first. Those will give you the biggest bang for your buck, and deserve the majority of your attention.

Once you collect your higher-value collections, you can then move down the line to the medium-value amounts, followed by the lower-value costs.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel today to access the free training, Plug Up Revenue Leaks to Achieve a 99% Clean Claims Rate, presented by expert Owen Dahl, LFACHE, CHBC, LSSMBB. Be sure to check our channel regularly for free weekly live streams and expert advice.