Defense Wins Championships

The old sports cliché gets repeated every time a new sport enters championship season. But when it comes to collecting patient balances, playing defense with data has been the key to Americollect becoming a champion partner in Early Out and Bad Debt Collections. We receive thousands of patient records from our clients every day, and if something goes wrong in the data export, transfer, or programming process, we could be trying to collect balances from patients that don’t actually owe. Can you say FDCPA lawsuit?! NO THANKS!

At Americollect, we implement a number of programming measures behind the scenes to make our clients’ lives easier, our service more effective, and the data we use to collect 100% accurate. The majority of our clients’ systems export a data file with all the information we need to list the accounts in our system and begin collecting. Here are a few defensive programming tools we use that have proven helpful:

Duplicate Account Catcher
One of the first things we built into our programming was a duplicate account catcher. Sometimes our clients accidentally send over last month’s placement file that has already been loaded into Americollect’s system. Loading those accounts a second time would cause a big mess, but our duplicate account catcher matches the new file against what has already been placed, and kicks all duplicate accounts back.

Alpha Split
Clients of ours that use more than one agency often use an alpha split to send guarantors with last names beginning with “A-L” to one agency and “M-Z” to the other. When this is the setup, Americollect places programming to look at the names on the specified level (guarantor in this case) to make sure we are not receiving accounts outside of the predetermined alpha split. If any accounts are caught, an email is sent to the assigned member of our client’s team to let them know of the issue.

Mapping Tables
Many of our clients include location codes in the placement files for the different points of service their patients visit; for example, which hospital in the health system, which ambulatory surgery center, or which medical group. We use mapping tables so that our clients can view performance data by location, as well as data quality by location, so they can see which registration teams are doing a better job gathering up-to-date patient demographics at point of service.

Headings Compare
System glitches sometimes happen in the data files our clients export. These can occur from various causes, but whatever the cause, our job at Americollect is to make sure that we catch any data variances before they wind up as incorrect balances in our system. Defensively programming a Headings Compare process is the best tool to make sure we catch any glitches. While in the data testing process before going live, we use the headings provided to check each live data file going forward. If even one heading is off, the placement process will error out and catch any data shifting. We then go back to our client to resolve the issue and ensure the correct data comes into our system.

Guarantor is a Minor
Each time we place accounts, our programming runs a report that flags each account that has a guarantor under age eighteen. We send this back to see if there is another responsible party on file to then collect from.

State Specific Protections
Some states have laws that require providers to handle accounts a certain way. For example, in California, it is illegal to send accounts to a collection agency unless they are at least 120 days delinquent. We built programming for our California clients to check the date of delinquency against the date listed, and hold accounts until 120 days has passed in case they accidentally send an account early.

Special Acknowledgments
We like our clients to know the minute their accounts are listed in our office. To verify this, we generate an acknowledgment report immediately after accounts are listed to let them know the number of accounts, as well as dollar amount total of the file. This way our clients know right away if what has come into our system matches what they sent.

If you’re anything like me, I’m sure you find all of these super in-the-weeds details about how we protect our clients and their patients from data mistakes absolutely riveting! Well, maybe not riveting, but at least you can rest at ease knowing that at Americollect, we go above and beyond to play great defense. And together we can be champions!