Claims need to be submitted to insurance on a daily basis and as quickly as possible from the date of service. If your office staff struggles with these daily charges, contemplate the benefits of a third party partnership. Having a third-party billing office to help ensure aspects of timely-filing, working claim rejections, resubmitting corrected claims and appeal submissions will then enable timely-statements to go out to your patients. Patients are less likely to pay a bill the longer the time gap is between when they were seen and when they were billed. Patient statements should be run through an editing process to ensure accuracy. They should be submitted at the same time on a monthly basis. Regular, timely statements will increase the likelihood of obtaining timely payments in return. There comes a time when some patients will become non-responsive to their bills. Every practice needs to have a policy set in place for outstanding balances. This policy should be informed to all patients at the time of service. A recommended process would be to send a maximum of 3 statements, the third statement being a collections warning. At that time, those balances would transfer over to your collections agency who can follow through with trying to obtain the payments owed.