In the health care field, there is an increasing issue with its inability to collect debt from the millions of underinsured or uninsured patients. Many health care organizations struggle to meet operational margins because the health care industry never treated their patients like customers. Many hospitals acquire billions of dollars in bad debts alone annually because there is an issue of patients that are truly uninsured and they can only collect a small percentage of the balance after the patients have been treated. There are many reasons as to why this happens and some of the reasons are from not gathering information from patients due to the lack of training of staff members or poor accounting practices. Here it will be discussed how a hospital in California called Sutter Health, took steps to analyze and correct these issues. It will show how the accounting practices that were put into place and the success of Sutter Health in doing so. Sutter Health is a non-for-profit community that is based in Sacramento, California. They provide services …show more content…
The whole structure that was put into place was to try to avoid missing information on forms to process the claims faster. Training is the most important part from registration to check out for any hospital or clinic to obtain the most correct information or verifying information for future billing. Applying the Sutter Health process of training and implementing could help in obtaining the funds that are due for the services provided. By cutting, the loss of funds by any amount is what stakeholders like to see. But, the overall issue is having the staff properly trained to work with the patients to gather the right information to see how the patient can pay at that time or when the patient can pay for the services that they were provided