Accounts Alchemy
CollectionTechnology.net, by Kieth Smith, 4/16/08

Collections solutions provider, nTelegent, released a study yesterday showing just how easily lead can be turned to gold, simply by doing a little digging into a a medical account.

Last week, I wrote about nTelegent’s solution for the medical services providers, the Self-Pay Management System. Yesterday, they released a report to support the utility of their product.

The solution, which was made to handle self pay accounts, is billed as being able to turn bad debt into good debt by automatically finding sources of payment, such as charities or government funds, that patients may not know they qualify for.

The report, which was an analysis of about 500 self-pay accounts written off as bad debt by 40 health care providers, showed that 50% of those accounts could have been collected on, and 17 percent of them qualified for government assistance or charity programs. 30% were written off as bad debt simply because the patient’s income or net worth were never verified when they received treatment.

It makes me wonder how much bad debt is overlooked in other fields of collections.