As a consultant that often works with medical practices to improve their collections and cash flow I am often asked what is good in terms of the amount of insurance A/R outstanding and the amount of A/R in each aging category.
Typically my response is that you really should not have to much more outstanding insurance A/R than a typical month's worth of charges if your A/R is turning properly.
Obviously this is going to differ based on your payer mix but with Medicare paying in 30 days and generally being the slowest payer this is a good rule of thumb.
I also tell clients that you really should not have more than 10% of your total insurance A/R greater than 90 days old. If you do then you probably need to focus more on denial management.
As an industry expert, what do you think are good benchmarks that practices can use to determine how healthy their insurance A/R aging is and to assess whether or not they need to restructure their current billing process?