Receivables for the Sole Practitioner

What “Receivables” really means...

Receiving payment is the final step for every appointment/session workflow and the lifeblood of any medical practice. However, payment is just one component of a broader term we call Receivables. So, what do we mean when we use the term Receivables?

Patient Support – Answering patient billing questions
Receiving Payment – Receiving payment from multiple payment types and from multiple channels
Accounting – Applying each payment to its respective patient account as well as originating bill or insurance claim.

Properly managing Receivables can be time consuming, sometimes even take more time than the actual appointment. However, skipping steps inevitably lead to costly accounting errors that usually end with an embarrassing conversation or two. IBEX provides the solution.

Apart from manually entering the occasional Cash or personal check transaction, IBEX completely eliminates the issue of Receivables for sole practitioners! Thanks to our Edge Computing architecture, IBEX’s Back Office does all the heavy lifting, allowing the sole practitioner to focus on what matters: patient care.

Patient Support

IBEX’s Patient Portal

Patients oftentimes have questions concerning their bills. Answering these questions can take a sole practitioner anywhere from a few minutes to hours (usually office-hours hours) researching the answers. Regardless, every minute spent rifling through insurance claims and remittance advices, searching bank statements, or on the phone, or e-mailing amended copies of bills is time taken away from another patient. IBEX’s solution was to develop what we call the Patient Portal.

IBEX’s Patient Portal is a secure, PCI and HIPAA compliant, mobile-friendly website that serves as a patient resource. Once logged into the site using 2-Factor Authentication, patients can review their basic information (e.g., their next three appointments, insurance carrier and Member ID, etc.). What makes the Patient Portal an invaluable tool for any practice

is that its patients can view, print, and download PDF copies of their bills/insurance claims and annual statements as well as make online payments (more on that in the next section) without ever distracting their healthcare provider.

Multiple Payment Channels

Once patients’ billing questions have been squared away, the next step in the Receivables paradigm is to receive payment. IBEX makes as many payment channels as possible opens as many payment channels to available to patient as possible.

Online Payments – The Patient Portal

Apart from serving as resource for patients to review their information, the IBEX Patient Portal also allows patients to make online credit/debit card payments. These payments are immediately processed by our merchant gateway in posted directly to the patient’s account in real-time. As with all card transactions, IBEX ensures funds are direct-deposited into the practice’s bank account on the next business day (provided the transaction takes place prior to 9:30PM EST).

In-Person Card Payments

IBEX Desktop is fully integrated with the Ingenico line of card reader terminals. The sole practitioner just selects the patient, makes any necessary changes to the amount to be charged (which automatically defaults to the patient’s balance) and hits the “Process” button. Just as in any retail store, the amount is displayed on the card terminal for the patient and they present their card. Our card terminals have magnetic stripe readers, chip readers, and support Contactless NFC allowing for Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay.

Card processing is instant and authorized payments are automatically applied to the patient’s account, just like in a retail store where the cashier doesn’t get involved in the account side of a transaction.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Card-Not-Present Payments

Sometimes, patients just want to pay by phone. IBEX supports this too! Instead of using the Ingenico payment terminal, IBEX Desktop presents the user with our own ‘virtual’ terminal. Just as with in-person payments, the sole practitioner just selects the patient, makes any necessary changes to the amount to be charged (which automatically defaults to the patient’s balance) enters the patient’s card information and Then hits the “Process” button. Just as with in-person payments payment, the authorized amount posts directly to the patient’s account and all the background accounting magic is completely transparent to the user.

Insurance Payments and Remittances

Part of IBEX’s one-time setup for our new clients is contacting both their In-Network and the most frequently encountered Out-of-Network insurances carriers and contracting them to:

Direct Deposit all payments into the practice’s bank account
Provide ERAs (Electronic Remittance Advices)

Just as IBEX’s Back Office submit claims to insurance carriers in electronic format, conversely, our Back Office downloads and processes the insurance’s ERAs. This allows IBEX to post payments directly to their corresponding insurance claim as well as to the respective patient account. Thanks to IBEX’s Edge Computing architecture, our Back Office processes ERAs completely independently of the sole practitioner. It’s so transparent that their computer doesn’t even need to be turned on!

Manual Payment Entry

As good as IBEX is, even we have limits. Cash, Zelle, Venmo and personal check transactions all happen outside IBEX’s scope and need to be entered manually. For these payment types, IBEX Desktop’s Accounting Module provides an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. As you would expect, payments are automatically posted to patient accounts with all the supporting journal entries.

Accounting… already taken care of

Most practices stumble for the simple reason that their payment channels aren’t “connected” to their accounting system. All of IBEX’s payment channels, even manually entered payments, post directly to patient accounts, automatically create supporting G/L entries, and funds are directly deposited into the practice’s account.

By making every step between scheduling and processing payments as seamless and transparent as possible, IBEX has not only eliminated just about every possibility for human error but has greatly reduced the period of time between billing and payment. The result is improved cash flow and healthcare professionals spending less time on the business of a practice and more time doing what they’re supposed to: spending time giving their patients quality care. It’s no wonder clients like Nancy N., have consistently doubled their revenue since using IBEX and are still with us today.