The High Cost of Undeliverable Mail—and How to Avoid It
“Return to sender, address unknown…” The Elvis Presley song of long ago tells of heartbreak over a letter that never reaches its recipient. In today’s world, hospitals sing a different tune about returned mail—one of breaking the bank, rather than breaking a heart, as the cost of undeliverable mail rises.
In addition to costing your organization valuable time and money, undeliverable patient statements are also a red flag indicating you may never receive payment. A double wammy.
Still wading through a mountain of undeliverable mail at your hospital? Here is a quick list of the various internal costs that are likely burdening your bottom line.
• Labor—Manual handling of stacks of returned mail and United States Postal Service® (USPS) notices, as well as the time and effort spent attempting to obtain address corrections and update your system
• Lost postage—The cost of original postage spent on mail that never reached intended recipients
• Lost materials—The cost of designing and printing statements including paper, envelopes, printing and processing expenses
• Third-party support services—The cost of hiring outside services to investigate and update patient addresses
• Re-mailing—The cost associated with printing and mailing statements two or even three times until the correct address is found
If you are still manually processing undeliverable mail at your facility, you might just write these activities off as a cost of doing business. But it doesn’t have to be that way. To help providers optimize their patient billing and payment collection systems, Emdeon developed Emdeon Return Mail Manager to help providers save time and speed collections by automating the skip tracing process for undeliverable mail. Instead of receiving returned mail at your facility, each piece is returned directly to our processing center to identify the current address and resend the updated statement.
One of the most powerful benefits is that Emdeon Return Mail Manager can quickly search various address databases to find the correct mailing address and automatically update the patient record in the Emdeon ExpressBill Services database to prevent the error from occurring again.
Are you ready to eliminate 100% of your return mail handling and collect more patient payments, faster? Visit us online or simply call 877.EMDEON.6 (877.363.3666) to learn more.
Read More >>
Getting Close to the Point of No Return (No Return Mail, That Is!)
