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Forwarded message:
Subj:    ***SAVINGS - SAVINGS - SAVINGS ***
Date:    95-10-10 18:51:38 EDT
From:    JKT7252
To:      JKT7252
 
                                        ATTENTION
                                  Health Care Providers
 
     Are you doing everything you can to help keep the costs of medical care
down? I'm sure you think you are and you are probably doing quite a lot to
help but there is one area of health care that YOU need to give serious
attention to.
 
     What is this critical area, you ask? Well, naturally, you expect to get
paid for the services you provide and you have gone through great pains to
set up and maintain a complex billing system. You are even further ahead if
you already use a computer to maintain complete medical records of all health
care for all your patients and to prepare the bill. But did you know, that
your billing system is where you can save the most on all of your expenses?
Think about it. You pay someone to sit there day after day to put all the
information into the computer and then generate a bill that you, most likely,
mail to the patient's insurance company. Well, you still need someone to put
information into the computer, but why are you still printing and mailing
bills?
 
     The majority of insurance companies have the capability of receiving
bills from health care providers by electronic means. YOU no longer need to
waste money on paper and postage. You can even sell that printer to someone
else, unless you need it print something other than bills.
 
     The age of data interchange by electronic means is upon us now, but it
needs YOU to make it work and to make it work even better than it does now.
And as for hospitals, if they are not sending bills electronically, then they
are wasting thousands of dollars per year in paper costs, postage and printer
maintenance. And there is no telling how much money is being wasted in phone
calls to find out if a bill has been paid yet.
 
     With electronic filing, the savings are not only apparent, but normally
a payment is made in a matter of days instead of weeks. And, the way the
system has been set up these days, you know immediately that your bill has
been received by the insurance company. How many phone calls did your office
make this year just trying to find out if the bill had been received, let
alone paid?
 
     The potential savings for you as the health care provider is enormous.
But if you really care about doing everything you can to lower the costs of
health care you will also consider the potential savings to the insurance
company as well. You may not be aware of it, but electronic filing of bills
saves them money also, which they can in turn pass on to the customer.
 
     Consider the typical activity of a claim sent through the mail. For
starters, someone has to open it and they have a salary to pay. Second,
someone else has to look at that bill and put all of the information into
their computer system. That's two salaries already to pay for one bill. The
cost of those salaries is calculated in the cost per claim that the insurance
companies have to recover and still make enough profit to stay in business.
Now we haven't even mentioned other overhead, such as the computer system
used to pay claims, or the programs on the system, or any other such measures
the insurance company takes to assure that claims received get paid in the
first place.
 
     But now let's consider a bill that was sent electronically. The
insurance has already saved one salary because no one needs to open the
envelope. THERE ISN'T ONE!!!! And another salary is saved because YOUR people
have already put all the information needed to process the claim into the
system. The insurance company's program just takes your data and puts it into
their program and, if all goes well, the claim CAN BE PAID OVERNIGHT. What
could be better?
 
     Just food for thought. One industry source calculated a savings of over
42 million for 1995 if all claims would have been sent electronically. FORTY
TWO MILLION!!!!! Whether you are an individual practitioner or a hospital or
clinic, just imagine the potential savings in the health care field if
everyone used electronic filing. STAGGERING!!! Absolutely mind boggling. In
one year alone you could probably afford that new piece of diagnostic
equipment you have been wanting.
 
     So what are you waiting for? Get someone in your office to find out how
they can get set up for filing bills electronically. There are companies all
over the US that have come into existence just for this purpose. Call them.
Get whatever you need to get on the savings bandwagon. Whatever investment it
might take to get you completely operational is well worth it. Even if you
need to buy a computer. Filing bills by electronic means should pay for it in
savings in the first year.
 
     For a listing of some of the companies specializing in the transmittal
of electronic claims to insurance companies and their phone numbers, send
your request via E-Mail to the sender of this report.
 
 
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