--------------------- 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. [log in to unmask]