Guest Commentary: Keeping patient credit cards on file was our practice's best decision

Brandon Betancourt

Guest post by Brandon Betancourt

A few years back, right around the housing bubble crash and nationwide financial crisis, I started thinking about how our small practice was going to be affected by these disruptions in the economy.

On one hand, patient care is always in demand. But on the other, patients were going to lose their jobs (and consequently, their health insurance). Because we are medical providers, we would continue providing medical care for children. But we knew our account receivables would be harmed as more patients were unable to pay their medical bills. 

As the economy got worse, insurance rates kept rising, deductibles and copayments got higher, and our medical practice was left with thousands of dollars of uncollected debt. This shifted the priority of the staff from medical health providers to medical debt collectors. The more time we spent collecting debts, the less time we were able to focus on patient care. We didn't like that. 

Thus, we decided to implement a credit card policy to overcome these financial challenges. 

The credit card policy states that all private paying patients must leave a credit card on file if they wish to be patients of our practice. The practice would continue to send out claims to patients' insurance company and bill patients for their portion of the balance, per the insurance carrier's explanation of benefits. However, if we are unable to collect in full for our services after several attempts to collect, we reserve the right to process the patient's credit card.  

The policy is well documented and addresses specifically how the process works so that our patients are well aware it. To protect ourselves, we also keep on file patients' signed consent, allowing us to process their credit card. For those patients with large balances, we offer payment plans and other alternatives as to not cause undue hardships. 

We believe that enacting this policy has been one of the best decisions we have ever made. It has helped reduce our account receivables, enables us to maintain a higher quality of care, keeps the daily number of patients at reasonable levels and has allowed staff to dedicate more time to patient care rather than patient collections. 

I would encourage you to look into doing something similar to this in your practice. Although it may be out of the ordinary for medical practices to do something like this, other businesses do it all the time. For example, you can't check in to a hotel without a credit card. Same goes for renting a car. 

If you are still not convinced, think about this: If people owe the practice more and more money, how will you continue to provide medical care? A broke doctor doesn't do anybody any good.

Start requiring a credit card from your patients. You'll thank me later. -- Brandon Betancourt is practice manager of Salud Pediatrics in Chicago and author of "Pediatrics, Inc." You can follow him via Twitter @PediatricInc.