<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none;" alt="" src="https://dc.ads.linkedin.com/collect/?pid=293162&amp;fmt=gif">
ZOLL Pulse Blog: Find out about the latest insights for EMS, Fire, Hospital, and AR Optimization.
Join us at ZOLL Summit 2023 in Denver, Colorado for our largest educational event of the year!
Request A Demo
Request a demo to see how ZOLL's solutions can help improve the clinical and operational performance of your business.

Reducing Emergency Department Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) in 2021

ZOLL Data Systems | Jan 19, 2021

In 2020, emergency department volume reductions and an increase in uninsured patients have caused financial ripple effects through the emergency medicine community. Emergency medicine providers are seeing more patients that are self-pay or moving from a private insurance plan to public plans such as Medicaid. This is largely due to job loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. There are also more self-pay patients associated with the trend toward high-deductible insurance plans.

Self-pay patients take longer to pay and have a higher risk of write-off. This adds to the pervasive financial strain on most emergency medicine providers. Also contributing to the strain is the decrease in patient volume seen in the first half of 2020. In the second half of 2020, emergency patient volumes are beginning to return, but remain below pre-pandemic levels. Many people are still making conscious decisions to stay home more, and pandemic-related job losses are not recovering quickly. This prolonged period of high days sales outstanding (DSO) reduces the cash flow and profitability rates for most emergency medicine providers.

Emergency Department

What Can Emergency Medicine Providers Do to Reduce DSO?

The actions that emergency medicine departments can take to maximize the speed of reimbursement include:

  • Utilizing real-time patient demographics verification capabilities
  • Deploying real-time insurance discovery tools
  • Using technology to monitor deductibles in real time and verify copays
  • Estimating propensity to pay

These capabilities are especially powerful when used together. ZOLL® Data Systems has found that implementing automated insurance discovery, demographic verification, and deductible monitoring can improve average reimbursement for an emergency department by 29%.

However, if an organization must add these capabilities over time, the first investment must be in insurance discovery. Emergency medicine departments get a clear return on investment (ROI) from finding more healthcare insurance coverage for which a patient is eligible. With insurance discovery, the earlier the eligibility data is captured, the better for minimizing DSO.

The bottom line is that using technology to better understand a patient’s financial health and access to care leads to better clinical outcomes, patient experiences, and financial results.

See the full article for more about the challenges to shortening DSO and recommendations for how emergency medicine providers can overcome them in 2021 and beyond.

Read Full Article

Related Post

Improve EMS Patient Satisfaction and Self-pay Balance Collections by Using a Modern Payment Platform
Patient satisfaction is a difficult puzzle for EMS providers to piece together. Medics are driven by a sincere desire to help people, but...
Read More >
ZOLL Data Systems | Mar 31, 2023
Strategies and Tips for Capturing Optimal EMS Reimbursement
When EMS agencies maximize reimbursement revenue from patient transports, they help keep their organization financially strong so that they...
Read More >
ZOLL Data Systems | Mar 21, 2023
How a Fire Department Used the New ZOLL emsCharts App to Solve Problems with Charting in the Field
Paper-based charting in the field is still the norm for EMS and Fire medics. Logging into a browser-based ePCR system simply isn’t...
Read More >