Traditional methods of coercing payment from patients, such as those used by many collection agencies, often result in resentment, passive aggression, avoidance, and negative public relations. No wonder recoveries are lower! It is possible to effectively motivate payment while maintaining your patients' dignity and goodwill. Here we will explore the revenue recovery challenges resulting from today's economy and offer examples of proven methods for increasing collections and preserving relationships by evaluating:

-HFMA Patient-Friendly Billing Initiative: Designed to ensure that patients are aware of their financial responsibilities in a clear manner.
-A Patient's Thinking Process: A new model has emerged that is based upon matching payment motivation methods with a patient's thinking process as it relates to paying their portion of healthcare bills.
-The Willing and Able Matrix:Based on a patient's beliefs, they fall into one of four quadrants of the Willing and Able Matrix. Depending on which quadrant they fall into, different strategies and techniques are used to best communicate with each group in order to most effectively collect payment.
-Patient-Friendly Persuasion Tools: These tools help to lower resistance as well as motivate payment. The easiest way to do this is to get patients to persuade themselves and this is done by asking questions.
-Human Performance Technology: A special set of tools and skills that can be used to find and train revenue collections staff in order to guarantee the highest level of patient satisfaction.

It is possible to take a truly patient-friendly approach to collecting patient balances. It takes the willingness to break old habits and industry patterns, hire
service-oriented people, engineer effective systems and methods, and apply proven sciences in human relations. The measures that are necessary require a great deal of human capital and discipline to design, implement, and maintain, but the results are increased revenues and increased patient loyalty for healthcare providers.