Urgent Care Answers From Stern’s Inbox

My e-mail inbox receives frequent email questions about the business of urgent care. I thought that readers might benefit from a few of my recent replies.

Q: We are opening an urgent care in California. We are planning to give a discount to patients who do not have insurance. We were thinking of giving a 70 percent discount. Is this a reasonable discount?

A: It would be extremely rare to offer such a big discount to self-pay patients. Many urgent care centers offer prompt-pay discounts in the range of 10-25 percent. On the issue of prompt-pay discounts, here are several notes:

• Unless your fee schedule is well above usual and customary fees, you could not operate profitably if a substantial percentage of your patients only pay 30 percent of your fee schedule.

• It may not make sense to give patients discounts just because they do not have insurance. Instead, many clinics give a “prompt pay discount” to patients who pay in full at time of service. They justify this discount because the patient’s payment is saving the clinic the cost of invoicing the patient or insurance, the cost of paying interest on the float for unpaid invoicing, the cost of processing collections, and the cost of dealing with accounts that are actually never paid.

• You may generate a compliance issue if you participate with Medicare and accept fees that are below a Medicare fee schedule.

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines

Read Comments [1]