Over the past decade, the U.S. health care system has undergone a major shift with the cost of care increasingly being transferred to patients. Much of this financial burden falls on doctors and hospitals when patients are unable to pay their cost sharing responsibilities for their medical care. The need for expertise in providing financial navigation services, has never been greater.
Oncology Roundtable reports that hospitals’ uncompensated care in 2010 had risen to $39.3 billion, an 82 percent increase since 2000. The American Hospital Association reports that uncompensated care, including charity and unpaid bills, made up 5.8 percent of hospitals’ expenses. As a result, Oncology Providers are finding themselves in financial hardship and are attempting to find ways to protect their practice from financial ruin. There has been a marked increase in infusion clinics being sold to hospitals in an attempt to buffer the financial losses providers are finding themselves in. Although a decrease in reimbursement from third-party payers has played a role in this, financial losses from uncompensated care has been a major contributor to the downfall of many private practice oncology groups.
NaVectis addresses these issues by providing focused attention to this highly complex problem by educating and supporting your Financial Navigator on how to transfer the patient and provider portion of the financial obligation to other coverage instruments, thereby reducing the dollars being billed to your patient and dollars adjusted to bad debt, charity and insurance denials.