Your practice doesn’t necessarily need to expand your hours or bring in new patients to collect more income. In some cases, you may simply have to evaluate your insurance payers to determine which ones are paying you enough and which are causing you to lose money.

One way to ensure you aren’t leaving money on the table is to rank your insurance payers to evaluate which you should continue working with, and which may need to go. These tips can help you make those choices.

Create a Scorecard

Your first step in ranking your insurance payers is to evaluate each insurer’s payment speed, rate reliability and denial rate. Once you have those numbers for every patient, create an average for each category. Any payer that falls outside of the average should be contacted.

For instance, if your average payment speed is 30 days, but Payer A is taking 56 days to pay you on average, it’s time to meet with your contact at Payer A. Let them know that you’re spending too much time and resources collecting from them and that you’d like to negotiate a higher rate to account for their slow pay times.

Do the same thing for any insurance payers that aren’t meeting the averages. By renegotiating the terms of your contracts, you should be able to settle on more favorable terms that result in you receiving more income for your practice.

Ask for Staff Feedback

Financials are just part of the overall picture when you’re ranking your insurance payers. Your staff should alert you about how difficult or easy it is to work with each payer as a second way of evaluating which insurers you should keep and which you should prune.

If your team is spending an inordinate amount of time getting preapprovals, fighting denials and resending documentation, that costs you money, and you should get paid for it. Ask every staff member at your practice about their experiences with each insurer and add that to your scorecard as you determine which are worth keeping and which aren’t.

Prioritize Contracts by Payer Behavior

Once you have all of the data about payment and staff ease of interaction for all of your insurance payers, you can make an informed decision about which payers are at the top of your list and which are at the bottom. Create a list of insurers you’d prefer to remove from your practice and meet with your contacts at those insurers to try and renegotiate your terms. If you’re unable to do so, then it’s time to determine whether you’re able to remove that payer from your roster.