I'm sure others have had this problem, so I'm throwing this out for some ideas/feedback.
We've had some issues with patient's walking away from bills and have had to send some of the naughty ones to collections - after 3-5 months of statements and weekly telephone calls for up to a month with no response. Once it's forced to go to collections, it's pretty clear the patients have no intention of paying us directly. Then, we don't hear anything from the patient for several months, sometimes up to a year - until...shock! They need something.
A week or two ago, I left early on a Friday. The doctor was here and got a call from the patients PCP that the patient had stopped taking his medication (on his own) about 5 months ago and had an event in the last 2 days. The doctor didn't think twice, looked up the patients phone number in AC and called him and gave him medical advice and an appointment the following Monday afternoon.
Then he looked in ACPM after he hung up and saw that the patient's account had gone to collections back in October 2017 and had still not been paid. He called me at home and told me what happened; I then had to come in Monday morning and call the patient and tell him he couldn't be seen and why. I'm sure you can imagine how that call went. I got multiple calls that day from both the patient and his mother (he's not a minor, BTW) grilling me about what my problem was? (Right, MY problem) I then had to explain, "well, if you'd paid your bills this wouldn't have been an issue. You never returned my calls or responded to our billing statements," *insert cricket sounds*.
We've had this situation and similar ones to it 5 times in the last 4 months.
That's the context. Here's the suggestion/recommendation that I've sent to the Development Team (without acknowledgement):
Add a box, simply titled: Block Scheduling or Scheduling Prohibited, etc. that when checked, creates a Hard Stop and prevents a patient from being scheduled. It then forces the user to look more closely at the account. It can later be unchecked by the Physician (username and password necessary, just like deleting an imported item), once the account is made current if he so chooses. This would prevent patient's from worming out of bills and still getting appointments and stealing the doctors time.
I understand that patient's need care, but I have to protect the office as well. As a small practice, we can't afford to have patients abuse us. Does any one else think this could be a useful feature? I've now sent the recommendation/request to the DT three times, but unless others are facing the same issue, I doubt they'd do anything with it.
