It is not a secret that the growing number of uninsured patients over the past few years is causing havoc on a hospital's bottom line. The typical trend in the hospital industry is obviously to focus on insurance accounts because that is where the majority of the collections come from. These accounts also tend to pay quickly and with little effort at the front end on collection. However, what some hospitals fail to recognize is that self pay, patient accounts typically represent a major portion of a hospital's receivable. These accounts often times do not get a great deal of attention due to the low balance of the account and the labor costs associated with the effort of collecting the balance. One of our Hospital client recognized that their lack of focus in the self pay arena was potentially causing major impact to their receivable. Not having the ability to focus in this area, the hospital would typically turn these patient accounts over to collections not only causing negative public relations but also paying a very high fee for collection on the account.  

Ajuba began working with this client which has a 400 bed hospital back in July of 2002. At the onset of this engagement, the client stressed the importance of patient relations and customer service. In fact, they felt they were not doing a good job at managing patient relations due to a lack of qualified staff and more importantly staff shortages. The customer service department was struggling with trying to manage the day to day business and also address irate inbound patient phone calls. Ajuba met with the Director of the Business office and collectively explored several options to resolve this issue. Time was of the essence due to the public relations issues that were mounting as well as the number of patient accounts that were going unattended. Recognizing the need to make such drastic changes, Ajuba proposed to manage the hospital's customer service department as it related to all patient accounts.  

Knowing that a great emphasis was placed on patient satisfaction, Ajuba worked diligently to hire the right profile of agents and also spend significant time in the overall understanding of the patient follow up process. During the implementation phase of this project, Ajuba involved the client in every step of the process to ensure they were comfortable with the agents that were going to be interacting each day with their patients. After collective development of calling scripts, payment policies and collection guidelines, Ajuba engaged with the client in several role playing scenarios to ensure they were comfortable in moving forward.

To date, Ajuba has managed over 120,000 patient accounts for this client with a value of over $70M. “The Director of the Business Office has stated “Without the assistance of Ajuba, we may have never collected on some of these patient accounts . Ajuba's efforts have provided us consistently with over 25% in collections in addition to increasing the satisfaction of our patient community”. Our relationship with the Director of Revenue Cycle has truly evolved into a partnership. Ajuba is recognized by the client as a corporate partner at the Michigan Association of Hospital Professionals (MAHP) and is frequently requested to assist with creative ways in which the relationship can be expanded. Ajuba currently manages all patient follow up for the Hospital and EMS services.