Healthcare

Another former client of American Medical Collection Agency has come forward and announced that 13,000 patients will be receiving notifications that their personal information may have been compromised in a recent data breach at the agency. Penobscot Community Health Center in Maine is the latest healthcare facility to announce its …

Everyone agrees that something has to be done to address the growing amounts of unpaid medical debts. Forcing people to pay for healthcare procedures up front leads some individuals to opt out of receiving healthcare that might be important. Sending patients a bill afterwards presents its own set of issues, …

More pressure from consumer advocates, lawmakers, and other officials regarding the practice of filing lawsuits against individuals who do not pay their debts has led another hospital to say it is re-evaluating its policies and procedures. A report last week cited the number of lawsuits filed by Methodist Le Bonheur …

A hospital that was placed in the spotlight last week for filing lawsuits against patients with unpaid medical bills has announced it will suspend taking legal action against those individuals and may consider hiring a collection agency instead, according to a published report. Mary Washington Hospital in Virginia was cited …

A nonprofit system of five hospitals in Memphis is under the spotlight this week, after a published report revealed the organization has filed more than 8,000 lawsuits against former patients for unpaid debts in the past five years, including employees who work at the facilities. The organization — Methodist Le …

Patients paid an average of 12% more to cover out-of-pocket expenses during 2018, according to a study of healthcare data released yesterday by TransUnion at the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s annual conference in Florida. The number of individuals who experienced an out-of-pocket expense of at least $1,000 more than doubled …

Nonprofit hospitals are more likely to garnish wages and see debt collection “to the final stage,” according to a study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association yesterday. The study looked at court records from 2017 in Virginia and found more than 20,000 lawsuits and 9,000 …

Xtend Healthcare, a revenue cycle management company that is a unit of Navient, has announced plans to hire 200 additional employees and make an investment of $1.3 million to expand its headquarters just outside of Nashville, Tenn. Xtend currently employs 1,000 individuals nationwide, 700 of whom work at the company’s …

More and more, individuals are turning to crowdfunding, using sites like GoFundMe.com, to raise money to cover the costs of healthcare procedures. For companies in the credit and collection industry, understanding this dynamic is important as those fundraising efforts are being used to pay off unpaid medical debts. When it …

About one out of every six emergency room visits leads to an individual receiving a surprise medical bill for out-of-network coverage, according to a study released yesterday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. As well, 67% of individuals are worried about being able to afford paying a surprise medical bill, according …