Because of Sizeable Deductibles, More Patients Owe More Money to Clinical Pathology Laboratories, Spurring Labs to Get Smarter about Collecting from Patients
One Arizona medical laboratory focused on collecting from patients who were overdue on amounts averaging just $40 and, in 18 months, collected $3.2 million!
In today’s clinical laboratory marketplace, competency in revenue management is becoming just as important as clinical excellence. Blame it on these multi-year trends: shrinking lab budgets, Medicare price cuts, and payers excluding labs from narrow networks.
At the dawn of this decade—just five years ago—few pathologists and clinical lab executives would have predicted that the financial survival of their lab organizations would depend upon becoming more proficient and more sophisticated with billing and collections. Yet this is now a necessary response to the year-over-year decline in lab prices and revenue experienced since 2010. (more…)
