Frequently Asked Questions

How are you different from a collection agency?
Traditional collections is inherently adversarial. Collectors are effectively competing with credit card companies, consumer lenders, and other creditors for limited patient dollars. By bringing all of the patient’s debt into play, Achieve offers a solution in which everyone wins, including the patient.

How are you paid?
Achieve is paid by both hospital and the patient. The hospital pays 12% of all debt recovered, and the patient pays a small monthly maintenance fee.

How do you target referrals? What criteria do you use to prioritize referrals?
Unlike traditional collections agencies, Achieve is able to target a wide range of patient financial profiles. The reason for this is that we target all of the patient’s unsecured debt rather than just the amount owed to the hospital. A patient may have a relatively small balance with the hospital, but $10,000 in credit card debt, so every call is important to us. We have found it most efficient to go after “balance after insurance” before self-pay.

How long does it take to implement your program?
With a commitment from the hospital, the only time required is to educate hospital staff, determine our points of contact and generate a referral report. We can be fully operational within 2-3 weeks. How will you service remote locations? We will require remote access to Patient Billing System and will make periodic on site visits. If the need arises, we would be able to place someone on site.

Will you slow our revenue cycle?
No. Our goal is to find the niche where we do not interrupt or extend the revenue cycle.

Do you have any printed materials we can hand out to patients?
Yes. We have business cards and brochures that can be made available at the cashier’s window or other points of contact in the hospital.

How does a debt management plan work?
A debt management plan (DMP) consolidates all of a patient’s debt—including credit cards and other non-medical debt—into a single monthly payment. . .

We get proposals from other credit counseling agencies, usually with very low payments. How are you different?
Because Achieve was created specifically in order to address medical debt, we view hospitals as our primary partners. Unlike credit counseling agencies and other providers of Debt Management Plans, we take care to ensure that the hospital is treated fairly, and that monthly payments are set at a reasonable level.

How do you introduce yourselves to our patients?
We introduce ourselves as a Debt Management Company that partners with your hospital. We explain that we are not collectors, but a company who offers a program that may be of benefit to the patient.

How do you get referrals from us?
We ask for an electronic report generated by your Patient Billing Software which includes both self pay and balance after insurance accounts.

Are the fees you charge the hospital contingent?
Yes. Achieve does not get paid unless the hospital gets paid. We can either invoice the hospital monthly or deduct our fee automatically, depending on your accounting preference.

What kind of external reporting can you provide us?
We can provide you with custom reports. Typically, we provide a report of all referrals who have enrolled as well as their monthly payments and remaining balances.

How long does it take you to enroll a referral and start getting payments to us?
Once a referral has indicated a willingness to enroll in the program, it takes between 10 and 30 days to return our paperwork and payment. Once the payment is in house, it takes us 7 days to release those funds to you.

What kind of extra work will implementing your program create for my hospital?
This depends on our level of access to your system. If we are able to “tag” accounts as enrolled and assign a vendor number to that account, the extra work is minimal. Without such access, we will need to have a contact who can provide us with accurate balances and answer questions.

What happens if our patient has accounts with us AND an outside collector?
We ask in the early stages for the names and contacts of collection agencies used. We do this so that we can work out arrangements with them directly or based on your contractual agreements, often recall the debt from the collectors thus saving you money.

What kind of information about patients do you require?
Name, address, email, phone, account number, insurance status, and balance due.

Are you willing or able to provide on site support like other vendors sometimes do?
es, we can provide some on-site support, including periodic visits from our financial counselors. In general, most of our contact with patients is over the telephone.

Can you call on seriously past due accounts?
We can call any accounts you wish us to call. A good example of how this might help a hospital is seriously delinquent accounts are returned to you from a 1st tier agency, before you send them to a higher feed agency, we could call them and determine if our plan can help. This could save significant collection cost dollars

What if accounts are already in legal?
We will ask you for the attorney name, and we will contact him or her to see if we can work out a payment plan with them. The benefit is that a legal judgment is avoided as long as the patient pays on time, which should result in a reduction in your legal fees. We have had good success in this area.

Why and how did you choose to target the healthcare industry?
Hospitals are often on the short end of the stick when it comes to collection on delinquent accounts. Studies have shown that medical bills are among the “least likely to be paid.” Shockingly, we have found that patients are more likely to pay for services such as cable television or Internet connectivity than they are for important medical care.

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Frequently Asked Questions