HYBRID Recovery: Best Way to Collect Unpaid Medical Bills

You have tried to recover overdue receivables from patients using reminder calls and sending invoices. But you are skeptical about sending accounts for collections, fearing a potential loss of reputation or hoping that your patient will magically pay you without the involvement of a 3rd party collector.

You eventually decide to send past-due accounts for collections. However, after a few months, you found the recovery results of your collection agency are not encouraging either. What went wrong? Debt collectors seem to recover money for everyone else, but not for your accounts.

Reason: You assigned the accounts into collections too late!

You probably do not have a well-organized process when your accounts should be assigned to a professional collection agency. Transferring accounts to a collection agency is a lot about timing, not about WHEN YOU FEEL they should be sent for collections.

They should be forwarded before 90 days for good results. Older accounts are harder to collect. Professional debt collection should be a systematic step in your accounts receivable process.

Hey. You are not alone. 90% of all medical practices do not use collection services timely. In fact, medical collection agencies are also partly to be blamed because they offer the same age-old “contingency” only collection service and nothing else. Some offer fixed-fee letter service, but that also comes with its limitations. Most of them do not have a service that fits beautifully in your AR process. This is where the HYBRID collection service comes into play.

Hybrid Medical Collection Service comes to the rescue!

It is not just a fancy term in debt collection. Let us see how hybrid debt collection precisely works.

* Once the medical debt has been overdue for 75 days, it is submitted in this program.

* Collection agency sends 1st letter on 76th day on your behalf to the patient. This is the final REMINDER letter to your patient, with no mention of the agency’s name anywhere.

The letter appears to be the last and final reminder coming from the doctor’s office (not from a collection agency). This letter gives a two weeks ultimatum to the debtor to pay off the debt; otherwise their account will be handed over to a collection agency.

* Still no payment? Then, after 15 days, the 1^st DEMAND letter goes out. This one is sent under the name of the collection agency demanding the payment. Now your patient gets really concerned. Chances of getting paid have become quite high now.

Every 10 days, your collection agency sends out 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th DEMAND letters with increasing intensity and consequences of not paying. Most patients will pay, however, if the debt has still not paid off, this account is transferred to a human debt collector who then makes telephonic collection calls.

Benefits of Hybrid Collection

It makes the transfer process to a collection agency very systematic and disciplined.

HYBRID service removes the ambiguity when the account should be transferred for debt collection. It becomes a part of your internal collection process and integrates when the account is 75 days past due.
Avoids the delay in transferring accounts for collections, precisely on 90th-day soft-collections start. This process MAXIMIZES returns. Nearly 75% of all delinquent accounts that are provisioned under the Hybrid collections scheme make payments directly to you.
The average cost per account of the Hybrid program is $15 per patient. Accounts can be purchased in advance, or for a couple of dollars more; you can qualify for Pay-as-used service.
The hybrid program is the ultimate program to protect your reputation. It is the MOST effective service to recover money from patients.
The hybrid program is so effective that you are guaranteed twice the return of your investment. Otherwise, you get your money back.

Accounts that remain unpaid are transferred for intensive collections after your invoice has still not been paid.

Like every other industry, debt collections have become more effective yet FRIENDLIER !! It sounds weird, but it’s true. Collection agencies get reviewed online, and people can find attorneys to sue collection agencies with a button click.

Collection agencies who follow amicable and diplomatic ways to recover money always beat those agencies’ recovery rates compared to those which are still stuck up their age-old ways of intensive medical bills recovery.