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receive payments from one of our primary third-party payers every
Thursday, so we know our AR days will typically climb until then.
Trouble spots?
Tracking benchmarking trends on a regular basis gives you a feel for
your overall performance and also provides insight into areas you can
improve. Maintaining AR days between 25 and 30 is a sure sign of
financial health. If you collect money in less than 25 days, every mem-
ber of your business office deserves a raise. If your AR days are 35 or
more, you likely have a collections issue that you need to address. If it
takes longer than 60 days to collect money you're owed from third-
party payers, you're basically giving them an interest-free loan.
If your AR days extend past 35 days, explore ways to improve it. Is
your facility waiting too long to send out bills? How soon after proce-
dures do surgeons complete and submit operative notes and how
soon after that does your business office code the cases and submit
the bills to the insurer? Every day that passes between surgery and
submission of the bill will accumulate your AR days on the back end.
We ask surgeons to complete their dictations between cases to ensure
we have the op notes the next day, when we code the procedure and
send the bill. We try to have the entire process completed within 24
hours of surgery.
To catch potential collection issues before they become major prob-
lems, keep claims in a 15-day tickler file, so your business staff can
confirm that insurers received the claims you've sent. If they haven't,
you've only wasted 2 weeks in your collection process instead of wait-
ing 30 days to find out a bill wasn't processed correctly. OSM
B U S I N E S S A D V I S O R
Ms. Martin (stephanie.martin@flaglerhospital.org), the administrator at Flagler Surgery Center in St.
Augustine, Fla., will discuss the benchmarks you need to measure and how often you should monitor them
at OR Excellence in San Antonio (orexcellence.com).
