NTelagent Partners Within Collection Industry to Help Health Care Providers

Today nTelagent, Inc., a next-generation revenue cycle company, and Affiliated Creditors Incorporated (ACI), a collection company serving primarily healthcare clients, have announced an innovative partnership that helps hospitals and other healthcare service providers to target appropriate patient accounts for debt collection and to ensure patients’ rights are protected.

“With the rise in self-pay accounts, healthcare service providers must collect payment from individual patients regardless of insured or uninsured status. Because most facilities do not have effective systems in place, this is often an unsuccessful endeavor, which leads to mounting bad debt within the industry,” said Earl T. Winter, chairman and CEO of nTelagent. “Many healthcare organizations turn to collection agencies such as Affiliated Creditors to help them with outstanding balances, giving these businesses enormous opportunities to improve the collection process for the client and the patients they care for.”

ACI partnered with nTelagent to pursue these opportunities, through implementation of nTelagent’s proprietary web-based solution, the Self-Pay Management System (SPMS).

Chad Williams, CEO of ACI, said, “Because we were looking to implement rapid technological advances in data mining and scoring, nTelagent was the logical choice. Using available demographic information, not credit score data, nTelagent’s system identifies an individual’s capacity to pay, improving overall collection potential.” In addition, the system ensures protection of patients’ rights by applying the proper recovery strategies to each person’s capacity to pay.

nTelagent’s technology helps ACI to more quickly and accurately identify where the collectible dollars are by segmenting data into usable, actionable categories. The system automatically provides ACI with a grading system of a patient’s capacity to pay, with a scale going from low probability of paying to high probability. ACI can now more effectively target those mid-to-high probability accounts. For example, while it once took ACI 12 months or more to gain back its return on investment (the company works on a contingency basis), it now takes the company only about three months. In fact, since implementing the nTelagent system in October 2007, the company has broken its collection records month after month.

Another industry-wide issue that the nTelagent-ACI partnership addresses is the fact that many providers do not accurately categorize those patients eligible for charity care due to lack of effective systems and demographic analytics, and they end up in collections or marked as bad debt. “The effect nTelagent’s system can have on a hospital’s charity care numbers is dramatic,” continued Winter. “For example, ACI ran one hospital client’s accounts receivable numbers through SPMS and showed that the hospital had improperly categorized one-third of its charity care dollars.”

In fact, according to a recent nTelagent study of over 40 healthcare providers’ aged trial balance (ATB) reports, 50% of the patient accounts that were written off as bad debt showed a capacity to pay. An additional 17% of patient accounts that were written off as bad debt had been classified as having low household income and/or low net worth. This indicates that they could have been evaluated for government assistance programs (e.g., Medicaid or local or state programs) or charity care processing, but were not. Williams says that he regularly is given accounts to collect that are basically uncollectible because the patient is eligible for charity and government programs. And this costs everyone unnecessary time and money, and could potentially subject patients to unfair collection practices.

Nashville-based nTelagent, Inc., a next-generation revenue cycle company, has developed a proprietary technology platform, the Self-Pay Management System (SPMS), that is revolutionizing the accounts receivable processes for hospitals, physician practices and all other healthcare service providers, in both inpatient and outpatient settings. For providers, SPMS improves upfront and overall cash flow, receivables and profitability by reducing bad debt and improving the revenue cycle process for self-pay patients. The company’s turnkey technologies enable providers to consistently move workflow to the front end of the revenue cycle, both pre-service and at the point of service. Using non-credit scoring data, the SPMS provides registrars and financial counselors with interactive scripts that integrate patient demographic information with each provider’s unique business policies and rules. The system also automatically identifies discounting and charity care options when applicable, ensuring that patient financial accounting — for both insured and uninsured patients — is handled appropriately and in a non-discriminatory manner.

Since 1981, Affiliated Creditors, Inc. (ACI) has provided innovative “debt recovery” solutions for its clients. From the start, ACI has built a reputation of providing the best service to all of its clients, large and small. ACI’s motto — “Your Collection Partner” — stands for what the company is and what it believes. ACI is not just a collection agency, but an extension of a client’s business office. ACI’s successful experience and leadership, coupled with a “team-like” atmosphere, helps the company’s staff members easily customize and adapt to a client’s unique collection recovery needs in an efficient and effective manner. These characteristics set ACI apart from traditional agencies.