Reaching the gold standard for healthcare revenue cycle, financial and coding performance

Medical Billing & Collections Extended Business Office Services

Ingram has performed a wide variety of short term and long term customized engagements that extend your business office Accounts Receivable capabilities. And now you can access your own AR data via Ingram's Information Web Portal, securely, anytime you need it to monitor your financial performance.

Highly Flexible Accounts Receivable Service Options

Extended business office and accounts receivable services are a major part of Ingram & Associates' Revenue Cycle Management programs and services. These programs are geared toward organizations that have a need for expertise and resources focused on the unique aspects of the billing, collections and follow-up cycle for insurance payers and self-pay/private pay books of business.

Extended business office and accounts receivable services can address a variety of scenarios based on your organization’s specific needs including AR clean up programs, early-out account resolution services and interim project staffing, to name a few.

These programs are specifically designed to supplement your hospital’s internal efforts, by functioning as an extension of a hospital’s business office, operating seamlessly with your internal operations and tailored to your specific and changing needs.

In addition, Ingram offers several specialty services to support your Accounts Receivable initiatives. They include Managed Care Underpayment Review programs, designed to evaluate and correct reimbursement errors due to contractual payment mistakes made by your payers. Ingram also offers Eligibility/Enrollment Support programs designed to assist your private pay patient population in determining eligibility and insuring that they are appropriately enrolled to take advantage of any funding that is available.

Insurance Billing & Collections - Commercial / Managed Care / Government

Ingram's team of medical billing and collections experts include groups devoted exclusively to various areas of insurance collections expertise including groups for commercial and managed care payers, government payers and self pay/private pay programs.

Ingram & Associates utilizes a unique and dedicated set of resources to support hospitals with a desire to achieve the maximum results from their collection processes. Our staff is focused by, not only the distinct class of account (commercial, managed care, government and self-pay) but also by individual payer, balance and age to ensure our Client's accounts are worked by the most qualified of staff. Our methods are designed to support, either temporarily or for the long-term, the facilities existing efforts, by selecting specific accounts based on age, balance or even payor, to be out-sourced to Ingram's highly skilled and focused collections team. Our teams may be brought on-site to help in your collection efforts, or utilized on a remote basis, helping to eliminate some of the high costs of travel, based on your specific needs..

Self Pay/Private Pay Programs

Collecting self-pay or co-pay balances after insurance from your patients is one of the most difficult and costly tasks that your Business Office staff will face in today's challenging collections environment. Self-pay collection processes take specialized training, experience and systems to maintain good patient relations while insuring that you are collecting payments on services performed for your patients. Today's economy and the ever changing healthcare environment has caused your patients to become responsible for bigger portions of their bills, causing in turn, your bottom line to become more and more dependent on your ability to effectively collect these self-pay balances.

Ingram & Associates' self-pay programs are designed to efficiently process accounts that have patient-responsible balances after insurance and 100% straight self-pay patient accounts. Ingram assumes complete responsibility for processing self-pay accounts from the day they become self-pay until they are totally resolved. This allows your internal staff to be re-directed to more important business office collections activities and to be free from the significant day-to-day efforts of answering patient accounting telephone calls. All services are provided transparently to your patient population, as an integral part of your hospital business office process.

Managed Care Underpayment & Recovery Programs

Ingram & Associates has a track record of recovering millions of dollars per year for our clients using our Managed Care “forensics” team of experts specialized in identifying payment errors under today’s complex managed care contracting environment. There’s no financial risk to your hospital with our managed care revenue cycle programs: our fees are contingency-based. Ingram’s Managed Care Programs apply our specialty expertise to your “lost” managed care reimbursement by identifying and recovering payment discrepancies that are out–of-compliance with your managed care contracts.

From the point when a hospital signs a managed care agreement to the point of payment acceptance by the hospital, the managed care reimbursement process goes through many distinct, complex levels where revenue can be lost. Ingram’s unique approach works, simultaneously, in two separate directions at once: 1) As a highly effective identification and recovery process that tracks the trends of incorrectly paid accounts across your inventory including the evaluation of primary-paid accounts, zero balance accounts and even credit balance accounts; 2) As a proactive mechanism to help gather and report valuable data back to the provider, which can then be used to improve the accuracy of future payments through process changes or improved contract negotiations.

Managed Care software solutions aren’t enough. Your number of managed care contracts keeps growing. Hundreds of contract terms and conditions keep changing, a challenge to any provider organization. Specialized managed care software can provide a great start to managing this challenge. Unfortunately, it does not by itself allow you to keep up with every contract, term and condition. In fact, 9 in 10 hospitals have limited manpower to attempt to oversee 100% of their complex managed care “solutions.” The result: gaps in your revenue cycle due to managed care reimbursement losses. Ingram’s managed care forensics experts know where to look to focus on key variations and trends and locate your missing managed care reimbursement.

Ingram provides a lifeline to detect and recover reimbursement that falls through the managed care “cracks”. Our Managed Care forensics approach consists of:

	A comprehensive, contract evaluation of the terms and conditions, including all updates to each of your managed care contracts.
	A detailed account review to identify under-payment trends and unrealized “lost” revenues.
	An in depth review of all underpayment variations e.g. Underpays, "0" Balances, Incorrect Revenue Codes, and even Credit Balances and the repatriation of funds back to the Revenue Cycle. Ingram has successful in not only identifying and recovering incorrect payments from ”0” Balance accounts but also in moving incorrect overpayment accounts to the proper accounts, thus resulting in additional collections.
	An overall review of contract peripherals such as pass-throughs, carve-outs, and contract outliers.
	A comprehensive reimbursement recovery process that is both professional and results-oriented. Ingram professionals are sensitive to payor/patient relationships, and our sole focus is recovering every managed care dollar that is due your organization

Eligibility/Enrollment Support Services

Ingram & Associates State & Federal Eligibility Programs focus on securing the maximum governmental assistance for those patients who are indigent, or self-pay patients who lack the income or resources to pay their debt owed to the hospital. Even with increasing numbers of uninsured and underinsured individuals, there are often government reimbursement dollars available. But it’s a matter of time and focus to ensure that your organization receives what it is owed for services provided to beneficiaries of state and federal programs.

State and federal eligibility processes can be difficult, intimidating, and time-consuming processes for patients and the hospital staff to undertake. Ingram has developed a comprehensive on-site screening and follow up process for all uninsured patients. Ingram offers well-trained, empathetic caseworkers to implement and follow up on all applications.

Each patient will be assigned an Ingram caseworker. Ingram’s caseworker screens the self-pay patient for any eligibility on the same day he/she is admitted to your facility. Our caseworkers work individually with the patient to obtain documents, provide transportation, schedule home visits, assist with paperwork or mediate between the state and federal caseworkers. Ingram clients are kept current on the status of each account that is an active file.

Interim Staffing

Often organizations find themselves facing open billing & collections positions due to local market hiring challenges, employee turnover or other reasons. These resource needs often require skilled professional where “temp” resources just won’t fill the gap. Ingram offers billing, collections and management resources on a per-diem basis to fill very short-term needs available either on-site or on a remote basis.