Author Archive | Kat Jordan

How Not to Lose Patients

Recently, I spoke to a Chiropractor who had lost a long-term family of patients and was understandably distressed.

The patient involved was an older man whose family had been seeing this Doctor for years. The man was confused about why his new insurance was not covering his treatment. The front desk didn’t know how to explain it. The Doctor didn’t understand it very well himself. He reached out to his biller multiple times for help and in the end was told, “This doesn’t fall under the scope of our contract.”

Ouch.

Shouldn’t your biller feel like a part of your team, rather than an uncaring foreign entity? Hearing this story led me to think over how I have handled this kind of thing for my clients. I would have just called the patient myself. The time it took me to explain the insurance confusion could have saved this Doctor’s relationship with this family. In exchange for a few minutes, I can keep a patient happy, the doctor keeps the patient, I keep my client happy and we all win.

If the front desk staff was well-versed enough, I might explain it so that they could relay it to the patient. The front desk would then also know how to handle similar situations in the future. I might draft a letter that could go into their training manual, which they could use the next time the same thing occurred. It’s no mystery to any biller that most patients don’t understand their own insurance, and that many office staff understand just enough to get by. Losing upset patients is a pretty big price for my client to pay for the lack of a little TLC.

In my philosophy, taking responsibility for your team is much easier than brushing off things that are “not your job.” And good customer service from a billing company can help avoid giving a bad name to practitioners and billers alike.

If I can be of any help to you, please let me know.

Kat

Kat Jordan is the Owner of Orion Billing Services
(415) 851-1605 

http:www.OrionBilling.com
Billing with Integrity