How to Deal with Unreasonable Patients in Your Medical Practice

A while back, I was working the front desk when a dad of one of our patients came up to me and said he didn’t want to sign the credit card on file authorization. I politely insisted he needed to fill out the auth form. He cut me off with loud: “WHY? Who came up with this stupid idea?” Awkwardly I uttered, “Ummm, me.” Now, both of us felt awkward. Silence… So the parent broke the silence and in a less aggressive manner he asked why we were doing this. He asked, “…don’t you get paid by my insurance company?” I started explaining how insurance worked. I happened to have a collection report on my desk. I showed him the bottom sum. It displayed the number that we had written off due to bad debt for the previous months before the CC policy went into place. His draw dropped. He said “I had no idea..” he then said, “…how can you run a business when you don’t get paid right away? “Now you know why this policy is so important to our office,” I said. He gladly gave me his card. In my experience, very few people will have a problem with your practice policies, whether it is collecting a charge for forms or instituting a credit card on file program. The ones that have an issue, will have less or no issue once you explain to them why you are doing it. Let’s call these two group the reasonable parents.  There will still be a group – a very, very small percentage of those that w...
Source: Pediatric Inc - Category: Pediatricians Authors: Tags: Customer Service Leadership The Business of Medicine Time Management Credit card Insurance Money Management Personal Finance Policy Source Type: blogs