Overcoming Staff Shortages in Healthcare

Dental and healthcare offices currently face staff shortages that significantly impact how providers address their AR inventories. The shortages affect many positions, from dental assistants to front office staff and nurses, who scramble to meet high demands with fewer resources. They also impact the back office staff, who must contend with billing matters. As a result, providers have less time to address bad debt than ever before.

Coming out of COVID-19 overworked and stressed, providers have been working longer hours and taking on more patients than they can comfortably handle. Even though there’s a greater demand for healthcare and dental services, the number of people entering the healthcare workforce cannot keep up with those demands. This staffing shortage has led to higher costs for dental and healthcare services. Offices must pay more to recruit and retain staff, and that cost is passed on to patients in the form of higher fees.

Additionally, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion recently announced changes to how medical debts will be credit reported, following a recent report from The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) about medical debt. The new regulations limit how healthcare debts can be credit reported, and many providers believe this diminishes the effectiveness of collection efforts.

In the meantime, healthcare offices have tried to compensate for their staff shortages by reducing hours of operation, hiring temps, cross-training staff members in multiple tasks, and offering hefty sign-on bonuses to attract new employees. But when combined with rising healthcare costs and general inflation that finds patients unable to pay their medical bills, staffing problems, and increased regulation around healthcare collections efforts on past-due patients, the situation appears dire.

Despite providers having less time and limited staff to recover their bad debt inventories, despite the regulations making collections more challenging, and despite the time-consuming process of vetting out and getting onboarded with a new debt collection partner, there’s still hope for successful collection efforts.

IC System offers a product called InstiCollect that allows providers to sign up in about 15 minutes online, without the need to negotiate with salespeople. With InstiCollect, providers can sign up today and have their debts receive collection efforts within one business day.

IC System has designed this debt collection product to help offices that struggle to find the time to deal with their past-due accounts. With InstiCollect, not only is the setup process fast, but submitting anywhere from a single past-due patient to many proves simple.

The staffing shortage in dental and healthcare offices is a complex problem that impacts providers and patients. In this environment, providers must work smarter, not harder, to ensure a healthy revenue cycle. No matter what size your office, from a one-debt inventory to thousands of debts on your books, InstiCollect is a smart solution that can overcome current revenue cycle challenges in the dental and healthcare industries.

Learn more about how InstiCollect works.