As demand for private healthcare increases, what can you do to ensure your practice is ready to welcome more insured and self-pay patients and provide a seamless service? In this series, Product and Marketing Liaison and former practice manager, Desné Marston, breaks down the patient journey to look at how the admin side supports the delivery of great care and explains how we can help.
Invoicing
In this blog I want to look at the most important aspect of any business – letting people know how much they owe you. If you’ve been practising in the NHS for a long time, you won’t be used to invoicing for your work so talking about money might even feel a little awkward at first.
However, an efficient and accurate invoice process is essential for everyone and for the reputation of your practice. You wouldn’t be impressed with a business that sends an invoice that’s late, unexpected or which contains mistakes so why should patients or insurers be any different?
When should you invoice?
With invoicing, it’s a case of the sooner the better after a patient has received treatment. Prompt invoicing is obviously important for business cash flow as it means you’ll get paid more quickly and reduces the risk of non-payment by the patient or their insurer. In fact, most insurers won’t accept invoices submitted six months after the date of treatment and prompt invoicing also reduces the risk of queries from payors (or enables them to be sorted out quicker while memories are still fresh).
How frequently you invoice is up to you. Some practices prefer to do all their invoicing in batches eg once a week while others invoice on completion of treatment. Much depends on whether you have a member of the team solely responsible for managing invoicing and payments or if they have to fit this in alongside answering the phone, greeting patients, dealing with correspondence and credit control. If you’re concerned about the frequency of your invoicing, you might want to consider outsourcing it to a medical billing company.
What should your invoices include?
To get your invoices right first time, you’ll need to include some key details which I’ve summarised below:
- Invoice number and date
- About you – your name, provider number and payment details
- About the Patient – their name, date of birth, address and policy number (if insured)
- About the Treatment – date, service provided, including the procedure code (if applicable)
- Total charges
You can find best practice guidelines and templates in The Industry’s Guide to Private Medical Invoicing, which we first published in 2014 and revised in February 2024. Not all payors require all the information set out in the guide but following the industry standard means you’ll get in the habit of including it and they’ll have everything needed to process the invoice on receipt.
Efficient invoicing is 80% preparation – meaning you shouldn’t have to stop mid-task to look for relevant info. However, the hard work is done for you if you use a specialist practice management solution where everything you need should be in one place for invoicing and for record-keeping purposes (we’ll cover financial records and reports later in this series). For example, when invoicing from ePractice, you simply select the patient from your database and go on from there. There’s also time-saving features like invoice auto-population (ePractice Lite and Pro) which completes the patient and episode fields when the hospital has already submitted an invoice.
We’ve put together step-by-step guides to invoicing using ePractice’s Quick eBill (for electronic invoices) and Advanced Bill (for electronic or paper invoices) which explains what’s required for each field. You can also sign-up to our free online tutorial with Healthcode Academy (Module 2 or Bite-size modules 2A -2D).
Submitting your invoices
Once you’re happy with your invoices, you need to send them securely to the payor.
For insurer invoices:
These days, hospitals and nearly all practitioners submit electronic invoices to insurers through our Clearing Service which automatically checks that each one complies with the relevant insurer’s requirements. Best of all, as a subscriber, you can submit all your invoices to the major insurers in one transaction which saves loads of time. You can take advantage of the Service whether or not you have an ePractice plan, as it’s compatible with most practice management software.
Nearly all invoices fly through with no problem and are collected by the insurer – ePractice users can check the status of invoices on the screen – but occasionally the system will notify you of an error such as an incorrect membership number or procedure code. If this happens, it’ll highlight the issue so you can fix it and resubmit quickly. We’ve produced guides to correcting errors for ePractice users and those using third party software or you can contact our team.
For self-pay patients and other payors:
You could print and post paper invoices to self-pay patients or send them by encrypted email (unencrypted email doesn’t comply with data protection rules). However, it’s much less time-consuming to use a secure online portal that lets you send invoices and accept electronic payments. One option is to register to use our affordable Online Payments service which we offer in partnership with patientzone. This takes the hassle out of invoicing non-insured payors and is available to both ePractice subscribers and those using third-party systems. It enables you to send electronic invoices or shortfall notifications (and payment reminders) to patients or businesses with a link so they can pay securely. Not only is this more efficient, it also makes life easier for patients. After all, most of us like the convenience of paying online for services rather than having to pay in person or by telephone.
Invoicing is an aspect of private practice which hasn’t always been given the attention it deserves, perhaps because it feels time-consuming or secondary to patient care. However, the option of electronic invoicing to all payors has transformed this task, with tools that make it less labour-intensive, alongside a streamlined process for sending invoices promptly and securely. It’s also in your interest to make invoicing as easy as possible for your payors so they’re left with a positive impression of your practice.
Discover More
If you want to learn more about how we can help you manage this and other aspects of the patient journey contact our Business Development team. If you’re already an ePractice user and want to explore the system, check out our guides or book a free 1-2-1 tutorial with one of our friendly experts at the Healthcode Academy.
About Desné
Desné worked in the private healthcare sector at various sites in London for over 30 years. She has extensive experience and skills relating to all areas of practice administration, having been a practice manager from the early 90s to 2019 when she joined Healthcode.
Next time – Credit control and collections
