🥬 Patient Statements – Athelas

At a Glance

The Patient Statements tab allows you to customize and automate your statement delivery to match the needs of your patients and practice. From this interface you can:

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Set the frequency of statement delivery

Set the maximum and minimum values for patient balances you want to send statements for

Set the methods of statement delivery (email, text message, or both)

Send paper statements to patients who are opted out of the above options

View upcoming and historical batches of statements

Measure the performance of your patient responsibility collections overall.

This is one of the most important interfaces in Athelas Insights.

Set it up well and it will run on autopilot for you, collecting patient responsibility with minimal (if any) intervention required from your team.

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Best Practices 1. Weekly statement sending is the most common setting, and prevents patient balances from building up too high. As long as patients pay their bills, they shouldn’t get statements all that often. 2. Combined text message & email delivery tends to be the most effective option for PR collection (vs. just one or the other). 3. Because paper statements cost you $1 per statement mailed, we recommend sending them no more than monthly, and only to patients who haven’t responded to text messages and email.

❗View Sent Dates of Individual Patient Statements

To view when specific patients were sent statements, you can check in either of two places:

PR Timeline

From the Claim Details page…

Choose the encounter in question

Click into the Activity Log tab

Click the PR Timeline tab

If any statements were sent, they will show up here. They will also note whether they were sent via text, email, or mail. You can also click the Details dropdown to find out what was included in the statement.

Keep in mind that if no statements were sent but PR was paid, you can check if any payments show up in this PR Timeline to find out if the patient paid their balance before being prompted to do so by a statement.

Touchpoints

From a patient’s profile, click the Touchpoints tab. All the texts and emails visible here are patient statements, or attempts to collect PR.

Note that previously sent paper statements will not show up here.

🌐 Core Feature Walkthrough

1. Set Up Digital Statement Delivery

If you only take one action on this page, this is the one to take. Once your configuration is set up, Athelas will operate by that configuration indefinitely, so you can set it and forget it.

Here’s how to get started:

Find the Electronic tab, and click into the settings area

Select how frequently you’d like patient statements to go out. Digital statements are free so the only consideration is how often you want patients with outstanding balances to be contacted. If a patient has a balance of $0.00, no statement will be sent.

You have the option to omit any providers or facilities whose patients should not receive statements. For example if one provider manages their own patients and has a separate PR system, they might not want Athelas to send statements.

Lastly, you can determine which methods of delivery you would like to use. We strongly recommend that you select Text and Email to maximize deliverability.

Note: You can opt patients out of digital statements on a patient-by-patient basis from their patient profile. Just toggle this setting to opt them out.

You can also view a list of opt-outs by clicking ‘Exclusion Settings’ right below where you specified your preference for delivery methods.

❗Important: Don’t forget to save your settings. Once you do, a new area will be populated on the page showing your next upcoming batch of patient statements.

2. Upcoming Statement Batches

Once your configurations are locked-in you’ll be able to view details for the next planned batch of statements to be sent out. Beyond summary metrics, there are a couple of actions you have available to take:

Send Now: Feeling impatient? Skip the waiting and send the batch right this moment.

This is often used after you first set the configuration and have never sent a batch before. There’s usually no reason to wait 7 to send the first batch.

Reschedule: On the flip side, you can change the send date for the next batch.

This is most useful if your batches are scheduled to go out on a day of the week you wouldn’t prefer, like a weekend in case patients want to call in to your office.

Download Batch: Lastly, you can download the full list of statements included in the batch to examine it in detail, or to store for your records.

3. Batch History

You can also review the details of recent batches, most notably:

Total Value Requested in the statements sent

Total PR Collected resulting from the statement

4. Top Level Metrics

Keeping an eye on the batch-level analytics is important, but at the end of the day the most important metric is: how much have you been paid, and how much is still owed?

This is precisely what is tracked at the top of the Patient Statements tab, so you can swoop in and know in a few seconds how your practice is performing on PR collections overall.

5. Direct Mail / Paper Statements

Although Athelas does everything in its power to prevent the use of slow (and comparatively costly) paper statements, some amount of direct mail is unavoidable.

The good news is, Athelas gives you a number of easy methods to send paper statements on an as-needed basis to keep cost to a minimum.

Method 1: From the Patient Profile Technically this isn’t in the Patient Statements tab, but from any patient’s profile you have the option to send them a one-off paper statement. This comes up most often when patients call in directly to request a paper statement. Here’s how to do it:

Visit a patient’s profile, and find the “Pay Balance” button.

Clicking the button will open a payment window. Select the “Request payment via paper statement” option, then click “Confirm” to send the statement.

Method 2: Bulk Send Paper Statements When you’ve got a lingering set of patients who won’t pay digitally, sometimes the only way to get them to pay is to send them a paper statement. For situations like this, there’s the bulk direct mail interface.

Find the Electronic/Paper toggle, and switch over to Paper.

This interface will allow you to save your preferred configuration for sending paper statements, but sending the statements must be done manually each time. There is currently no way to set up auto-sending for paper statements.

You’ll now be presented with a wide variety of filters, designed to help you surgically target just the patients you want to send paper statements to (since they cost $1 each). Most important among these are:

Inclusion of patients with invalid emails and invalid cell phone numbers.

Deciding how many digital statements a patient has to ignore before they qualify to receive a paper statement.

And selecting how long you want to wait between paper statements for a given patient. This you can use the tool frequently without worrying that you’re wasting money by sending statements to the same patients over and over.

Once you’ve configured your settings hit the ‘Save Setting’ button to lock them in. The statements aren’t sent yet, but your preferences are stored.

Now all you have to do is click the ‘Send Now’ button to trigger a new batch of paper statements to be queued up and mailed out. And any time you want to send a batch of paper statements in the future you’ll be pre-configured to do so in a couple of clicks.

Alternate Address

If the patient would like statements sent to a different address than the one listed on their profile, simply navigate to the patient’s profile, open the Actions menu, and click ‘Edit’ to edit their statement mailing address. Then, enter the new address or PO Box that will receive statements.

In Conclusion

The Patient Statements tab provides a wide range of options to inform you patients about what they owe, from digital first methods to snail mail. With just a little configuration this system will hum along in the background, collecting patient balances with minimal work for you and your staff.