Healthcare providers looking to collect late payments before they become bad debt will soon have a new tool at their disposal.
Internet Payment Exchange (IPayX), a Toledo, Ohio-based provider of electronic billing and payment technology and customer service solutions, has announced a partnership with Ventura, Calif.-based Accelerated Revenue Management (ARM) Solutions to offer soft collection capabilities through IPayX’s eInvoice Delivery Service and eCareView Healthcare Billing Portal.
The collaboration targets healthcare bills that are 60 to 300 days overdue, which identifies them as late payments but not yet bad debt. ARM Solutions acts as a soft collections provider, contacting delinquent customers with client-approved communications to arrange and facilitate payment.
“Traditional third-party collection agencies often alienate customers and typically charge an average of 32 percent of collected amounts as payment, but they only collect an average of less than 16 percent of the accounts assigned to them,” said Brad Jadwin, president of ARM Solutions, in a press release. “Our flat fee collection services are different because they are based on a fixed price per account and recovery rates average more than 40 percent. More importantly, the goal of the flat fee approach is to treat delinquent consumers with dignity during the collection process and to retain them as customers. Relationships with customers have traditionally been an area of concern for healthcare providers and are important to many other billers as well.”
IPayX’s portals are used to collect delinquent payments and update payment activity status in real-time, eliminating confusion as to who owes what and reducing the need for collection agencies and further staff time and effort chasing down bad debt.
“We find that with the soft collection process from ARM Solution leverages our clients' investments in payment systems and enables them to implement soft collections with no impact to their internal IT staff,” said Douglas Braun, president and CEO of IPayX. “We partnered with ARM Solutions to provide hospitals, physicians' offices and commercial billers with collection services that are an attractive alternative to using typical third-party collection agencies.”
