How to Achieve Better Patient A/R Management through Secondary Service Providers

As the song goes, breaking up is hard to do. But when it comes to relationships between healthcare providers and collection partners, the bonds can sometimes seem virtually unbreakable.

Over the years DECA Financial Services has built relationships with our healthcare provider partners that are solid, but there is always room to do better. We regularly meet with our partners to identify areas where we can improve, find ways to boost collections, provide additional services, or increase the rate of cash flow.

We want to grow with our partners, but at the same time, we grow by taking on new clients. In recent years, we’ve found a niche by at times assuming a secondary role with some healthcare providers. In many ways this has been an eye-opening experience for us, for it gives us a direct view into how providers engage with multiple service providers to best meet their needs.

We’ve found that while there are many consistencies in conducting business, there also are many different ways providers and their partner agencies work effectively together. Many of these relationships have been years in the making, and they are almost organic entities on their own, built upon trust, confidence, and openness.

One of the first lessons we learned is not to interfere in that relationship. We’ve spent a lot of effort on our part learning how to work in complementary to the primary, engaging them and the provider in a way that is always constructive and always in the best interest of everyone involved, the provider, its revenue cycle management partners, and its patient population.

When in the course of business a strain in the relationship between a provider and its primary agency or agencies should arise, cooler heads must prevail. We’ve put together a brief paper with a host of valuable tips on how to preserve, protect, and even nurture that relationship. We trust that it will help you better manage your service provider relationships to control costs and continue to provide the highest quality health services to your patients.

Click here to download How to Improve the Performance of Your Healthcare Collection Partner.

John Owen is the Director of Client Development at DECA Financial Services in Fishers, Indiana. Check out other great content in the DECA Blog–Bottom Line Results Matter–on insidePatientFinance.com.

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