Medical Collection Letter
How To Write A Medical Collection Letter For A Patient And 7 Tips To Improve Your Results
Medical dues are always a concerning point for healthcare providers. Most healthcare providers struggle to get a simple response from their patients regarding pending payments. Healthcare providers spend a significant amount of money on printing and mailing medical collection letters, only to get no response from patients.
But what if we tell you that you could create effective collection letters for your healthcare organization and get valid responses from the patients? We will explain how healthcare organizations write an effective medical collection letter here.
Through this guide, you can take a look at some tips to generate a valid response from your patients. The guide even includes a collection letter sample so you can get a complete understanding of what your collection letter should look like.
How to Write An Effective Medical Collection Letter For Your Patients?
Writing an effective medical collection letter can often be challenging. Healthcare providers must understand how to draft effective collection letters. You must ensure that the message and the situation’s urgency are conveyed clearly to the patient.
There are several steps to ensure the quality of your healthcare organization’s medical collection letters. Implement the following measures to create a compelling collection letter for your healthcare organization.
Step 1: Ensure Your Mailer Can Catch The Reader’s Attention
The average person receives dozens of letters every week, and many of them are just junk mail. Junk mail is poorly targeted marketing materials sent to the customer via postal mail. People usually tend to put the junk mail in the trash after a glance through it.
There is a good chance that the patient disregards your medical collection letter after mistaking it for junk mail. Hence, your medical collection letters must catch the recipient’s attention at first glance itself. You can use some nifty techniques to make your collection letters more attention-grabbing. Consider the following methods, for instance.
The 3:33 Rule
There are just three things that you need to know about the 3:33 rule, and they are as follows.
- Your medical collection letter needs to stand out from the rest of the mailers a customer receives within 3 seconds of receiving it.
- The healthcare collection letter you use needs to engage with the recipient within 30 seconds of receiving the letter.
- After the recipient has read the letter, you have 3 minutes to prompt the desired response from them.
The 3:33 rule was originally created for sending promotional or marketing materials to customers via mail. However, it is an effective way to ensure that your medical collection letter does not get mistaken for junk and catches the recipient’s attention.
Plan Out The Look For Your Medical Collection Letter
What matters most when the patient first sees your collection letter? How can you ensure that the recipient knows the letter is from you even before opening the envelope? These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself before sending out your medical collection letters.
Some of the aspects you need to take into consideration for planning the look and feel of your medical collection letter are:
- The recipient should be able to tell the sender of the letter before opening the envelope
- You need to ensure that the mailer looks official and thoroughly professional
- Make sure to add personal touches to the letter that shows a person wrote and signed it
The best way to accomplish this is to keep all these aspects in mind when designing your collection letters. Additionally, make it a point to add your brand logo and ensure the design aligns with your branding for everything you send.
Prioritize The Trust Factor
The trust factor in commercial space is different from the one in healthcare. For a commercial product or service, you first have to gain the customer’s trust so that they buy your product/service. In healthcare, especially in the case of a medical collection letter, the patient already trusts you and git their healthcare service from you.
However, when sending direct mail communications, this gap between the commercial and healthcare sector reduces significantly. In other words, sending a mailer is equally difficult for the commercial and healthcare industries.
Thankfully, it also means that the direct mail strategies for commercial audiences will work on your patients. Additionally, you can enhance your direct mail communication by using direct mail service providers like PostGrid, which offers specialized print and mail services for healthcare.
Step 2: Identify Must-Have Information On Your Medical Collection Letter
Now that you have a well-designed letter and envelope that your patients can quickly identify, you can begin drafting your medical collection letter. It should be relatively easy for healthcare organizations to draft a collection letter because it is common for other businesses.
The entire financial industry revolves around bad debts and collection letters of all kinds. You can use the knowledge from different sources like this to create the perfect collection letter for your healthcare organization. Go through many medical collection letter examples and research online for drafting your letter.
Information You Should Include In Your Medical Collection Letter
The collection letter for your healthcare organization is an important document. Hence, it must always contain all the relevant details the patient needs. Here is a list of information you should always include in your medical collection letters.
- Balance due
- Due date
- Account number
- Account status
- Patient responsibility
- Office hours
- Financial relief
Seeing all the details stated above in the letters enables the patient to get a good idea of your medical collection letter. Furthermore, highlighting these pieces of information is an effective way of saying “this is what you owe” and “this is how you can pay us.” It also helps the patient access the required details to make the payment easily.
Ensure The Validity of Your Address Data
The best thing you can hope for when sending a medical collection letter is that the patient didn’t receive their statement in the first place. But, even in this case, there is a big concern that you need to address. If the patient didn’t receive the mailer, it could mean that you sent it to the wrong address.
For commercial businesses, such an issue would not be a big deal. But, with patient data, sending the collection letter to the wrong address opens up a different pandora’s box, i.e., HIPAA compliance. Any HIPAA violation can lead to severe consequences and heavy fines.
Learn more: Complete HIPAA Compliance Checklist for 2022However, the more likely scenario of why the patient’s payment got delayed is because they could not afford it at the moment. An interesting piece of data released by CNBC says – Almost 1 in 4 Americans are skipping medical care because of the cost. Unfortunately, this is a reality that all healthcare providers must face before sending a medical collection letter.
Step 3: Maintain A Friendly Tone In Your Communication
At this point, we know the design considerations for the collection letters that a healthcare provider sends. Now, we can move on to the messaging part, more specifically to the tone of your message. The tone you set for your medical collection letter can significantly impact the effectiveness of your letter.
Let’s face it; no one enjoys writing a letter to people asking them to make their overdue payments. Yet, it still needs to be done.
Avoid Being Harsh or Misunderstood By The Patients
It is so easy to misunderstand communication when the other person can not see your face or hear your tone of voice. People, in general, tend to misinterpret your tone of voice, and it is only more common in a medical collection letter. Hence, healthcare service providers must be extra careful with the style of voice they choose for the collection letter.
Use Light-Hearted or Collaborative Tone
One of the safest approaches is to maintain a light-hearted tone. You can also consider a style that suggests a collaborative approach for settling the patient’s payment dues. The collaborative manner is often more encouraging to the patient and feels almost reassuring.
Be As Empathetic As You Can
Being a healthcare provider is not always about money. But, by the end of the day, healthcare is also a business, and it can not function without money. You can’t go around the part where you ultimately ask for the payment. However, you can remain empathetic in your message and its tone.
Sending a medical collection letter means you have already sent multiple statements to the patient. When you finally have to send the collection letter, you have the choice to be polite and work out a solution. Even being relatively firm can come off as intimidating to the patient.
7 Tips For Improving The Results Of Your Medical Collection Letter
We know writing medical collection letters is not easy. Furthermore, you can never get everyone to make their due payments regardless of how well-made you create the medical collection letter. However, you can make your medical collection letters more appealing and empathetic to maximize their effectiveness to the recipient. Here are some tips you can use to make your collection letters more effective.
1. Group Your Collections List
Generally, there are four reasons why a patient is delaying their healthcare payments, and they are:
- The patient has confusion in understanding the bill
- The patient unintentionally missed or forgot to make the payment
- The patient can not afford to make the payment at the moment
- The patient had no intention of making the payment in the first place
By going through your collections list and examining them closely, you can categorize them into one of the four groups. Grouping your patients like this will help you make specialized medical collection dispute letters for each group.
However, it is not an easy practice to implement and may sometimes depend on certain assumptions. Hence, it would be best to ask practitioners for their insights. It might surprise you to learn how much information the physician or nurse can provide on specific patients.
When you group the collections list into four groups, the last group is treated differently from the rest. Only the last group does not have a legitimate reason for not making their healthcare payments. Hence, you can use more delicate communication with the first three categories of patients.
2. Send A Gentle Reminder
Whatever the reason for the nonpayment status of the patient, you need to send them a reminder first. The payment reminder is usually sent before the letter of explanation for medical collections. As you can guess, the purpose of the payment reminder is merely to let the patient know that their medical bill is overdue.
When writing a payment reminder for your healthcare patients, you shouldn’t hint at anything that may sound like a threat or intimidation. Instead, you can try acknowledging in your letter that the details of the medical bill may be hard to understand.
Additionally, you can invite the patient to contact you via phone calls or any other means for answering any questions they may have. You can even use an automated direct mail tool like PostGrid to send reminders automatically to your patients.
Learn more: What is an Automated Direct Mail?3. Consider Sending A Text
Many healthcare practitioners are now using text messages to inform their patients about their invoices. Texts are particularly effective if the customer unintentionally missed or forgot to make their healthcare payments. You may not even have to send the medical collection dispute letter in such cases.
Texts are ideal for noninvasive communication compared to others, such as phone calls. Perhaps, the best thing about it is that you can receive immediate payments. Furthermore, it is the best alternative to direct mail if you don’t have an accurate direct mail system.
Millennials take their phones with them everywhere they go. It is relatively easy for the text to catch their attention. You can even add links in the text messages that the patient can use for easy and convenient payment. Similarly, the link can also lead to a landing page where patients can raise their questions about their dues.
4. Let Them Know You Are There To Help
Another thing you can do to create a better medical collection letter is to ask how you can assist patients with their payment plans. Even the fact that you are willing to help your patients with their payment plans shows that you care about them.
Furthermore, it is an indication that the patient’s health is your first concern, even before money. Hence, it is ideal for building a good patient relationship for your healthcare business. Even something as simple as “Can we help you?” in your letters may be enough to prompt a response from the patient.
The response may not always be the one you want. Sometimes the patient may ask for a grace period, help from their insurer, or a discount on the bill. However, any such response is still better than no response as it is still a step in the right direction. Apart from all this, a sensitive medical collection dispute letter can also help you build patient loyalty.
5. Avoid Your Medical Collection Letters Sounding Too Stern
Collection letters, in general, tend to use very harsh language. Medical collection letters sometimes mention that the patient would be sent to a collections agency unless they make an immediate payment.
Apart from the message itself, the collection letter also includes phrases such as “Final Warning,” “Delinquent,” and “Third and final attempt.” In other words, the standard medical collection letter assumes that the nonpayment is by choice.
But, in reality, most patients have a valid and justifiable reason for not making the payment in time. And more to the point, intimidating letters rarely work even though they may scare some people. But for a chronic or seasoned debtor, it is just another collection letter to ignore.
Another possible reaction to such stern language in your letter of explanation for medical collections is anger. No one likes to be called a delinquent, and it might be enough to trigger some people. Hence, there is a chance that the patient delays their payment intentionally because they got angry about the collection letter.
6. Don’t Hesitate To Call The Patient If Necessary
It is not uncommon to encounter patients who do not respond to your medical collection letters. But, even at this stage, you should give the patient the benefit of the doubt. It is okay to resort to phone calls when your letters go unanswered.
However, the purpose of the call is not to guilt-trip your patients or intimidate them. The phone call should be an informative one. It might help to assume that the patient did not receive any of the medical collection letters you sent.
Make it a point to gently let the patient know that you haven’t received their payment. Then go on to ask them whether the patient has any questions regarding the statement or the amount they need to pay. Furthermore, you can also offer the patient to set up a payment plan to help them.
7. Use A Tested Medical Collection Letter Template
It is always better to use a tested medical collection letter for your healthcare organization than try a new one. Testing new collection letters for your healthcare organization is relatively easy if you have a print and mail API tool like PostGrid.
It enables you to track your direct mail communication and gather valuable insights. As a result, you can quickly identify the most effective medical collection letter and use it for your future collection efforts. Some of the critical aspects to consider when selecting the ideal collection letter template for your healthcare business are:
- The collection letter template should be direct about the message.
- Ensure the collection letter template uses polite language throughout the collection letter.
- The collection letter template you choose must have a non-threatening tone.
Medical Collection Letter Sample
There is no easy formula for writing a medical collection letter. We have already discussed what to do and what not to do when creating a healthcare collection letter. The following example of a collection letter from the medical office will help you get a comprehensive picture of your collection letter.
Dear [Patient Name],
We sent you a billing statement to you over a month ago regarding the healthcare services you accessed from [Provider Name]. Till now, we have not yet received a response from you.
We want to inform you that your current balance with [Provider Name] is $[Provider Balance].
Patient statements and insurance slips can be really confusing at times. If that is the case, you can always seek our help regarding any question you have about your payment dues.
Our organization is duty-bound to help patients who are experiencing financial difficulties. If that is the case with you, please feel free to get in touch with us so we can come up with an amicable payment solution for you.
Our goal is to help you fulfill your commitment without any hardships. So, please feel free to contact us on [Phone Number]
If you have already made the payment mentioned above, please disregard this letter.
We look forward to hearing from you soon or that you make the due payment within five days.
Sincerely,
[Name]
Conclusion
Healthcare providers often send a medical collection letter to their patients. There are a lot of factors you need to consider while creating collection letters for your healthcare business. Additionally, there are several other strategies you can try to make your collection letters more effective.
It is up to the healthcare provider to draft an empathetic and effective collection letter for its patients. However, merely crafting the message for your collection letter is not enough. It would be best to have an advanced print and mail tool like PostGrid for sending letters effectively.
With an advanced tool like PostGrid, you can easily personalize, print, and deliver your medical collection dispute letter. Furthermore, PostGrid is a HIPAA complaint tool that ensures the security of patient data and streamlines your entire healthcare communication.
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