Collections

Collections

ACC 281: Accounting Concepts for Health

Collections is a department that is an extremely important department in a health care facility because without it there would be no way of monitoring, tracking, and collecting on accounts that require a patient to pay due to it not being written off as a charity care that was given. Most facility find themselves in a position where their collections departments are not either keeping up with the amount of collections that must be completed, and tracked or technology has went further than their current technology. Either way a retooling of this department is required. This paper will look at one such retooling that was done by a healthcare facility.

California's Sutter Health ran into such a problem, and decided to re-examine how they were doing business and especially when it came to collecting on accounts what needed to be paid. After looking at the processes of collecting on accounts they found one major problem was how they were collected and decide to empower their patient financial services (PFS) to assume responsibility for each account they deal with, in effect each person in the central business office (CBO) owns his or her business, complete with customized dashboard to tracking progress, (Souza, M. & McCarty, B. 2007).

Front-End Collecting was another element that Sutter Health discovered need to be re-designed in the collections area. After looking at this area for way to improve collection they implemented a rule that "each registration by analyzed by a rules engine before the patient leaves the registration desk to identify potential problems," (Souza, M. & McCarty, B. 2007). Front-end collecting is important due to a "potentially large current liability relates to collections for third parties. For instance, businesses are tasked with collecting sales taxes. The seller of taxable goods must collect sales tax from a customer and then turn the money over to a taxing...