Dental and Medical Collection Laws Your Medical Practice Needs to Know

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Dental and Medical Collection Laws Your Practice Needs to Know

Dental and medical collection laws are part of federal guidelines on collection agency practices. They're designed to prevent abuses in collections activities, such as harassment, abusive or threatening language, etc.

If you're operating a medical or dental practice, you almost certainly have a percentage of patients who are slow payers. Or they don't pay you at all. While you want to collect on your unpaid, delinquent accounts, you also need to know the laws spelled out in the The Fair Debt Collection Protection Act, or FDCPA for short.

Violations of the FDCPA could expose your medical practice to litigation from an unhappy patient. If you're handling your own in house collections, then you're subject to these same guidelines as any outside collection agency would be.

In fact, there are a number of reasons why you might be better off outsourcing your delinquent accounts to third party collections agencies, Here are a few:

Collections agencies are trained and skilled professionals who operate within medical and dental collection laws guidelines.
Collections agencies have experience dealing with the delicate matters of collecting past due receivables.
By outsourcing, you insulate your practice from being seen as the bad guy attempting to collect, keeping patient-physician relationships intact.
Savings in money, time, reduced stress from over-worked, and under-trained internal staff. You improve efficiency by focusing on your practice's core business, which is administering care, not collections.
You avoid potential legal liabilities and running afoul of dental and medical collection laws.

Here's an illustration to highlight the point above:

If an employee from your practice called a patient to remind them of an outstanding bill, and someone other than the patient answered the phone, what should this employee do?

Unless the person answering the phone is the patient's spouse, all of the above options, except option number 3, if a violation of the FDCPA. Here's why:

When calling a patient about a bill, the FDCPA requires creditors to identify who they are. You must state the name of your business, even though you can't say what you're calling about, if you're not talking with the patient.

DebtCollectionSteps.com has successfully advised medical and dental practice facilities all over the United States about dental and medical collection laws, and helped them recover thousands in lost profits and medical debt.

Contact us, or complete our simple quote form below. We'll be happy to help your medical practice recover on your medical bad debt too!

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