Healthcare Collections for Mental Health Practices

Patient balances are the receivables that most billing operations quietly abandon. After insurance adjudicates, the remaining patient responsibility — copays, deductibles, coinsurance, and balances from out-of-network encounters — frequently goes uncollected. The typical practice writes off 15–30% of its total receivables to patient-side bad debt. That's not a billing problem. It's a collections problem.

Healthcare Collections Management is the active recovery layer that addresses those balances with structured workflows: payment plans, financial hardship programs, patient financing coordination, and revenue recovery processes designed to capture what standard billing leaves behind. Critically, it's run by the same team managing your insurance claims — not handed off to a third-party collection agency your billing vendor has never spoken to.

What's Included

The Collections program runs as a structured add-on to any active Sharp RCM engagement. It is not available independently of RCM — the two services share data, workflow, and principal accountability, which is the source of their effectiveness. Separating them eliminates that advantage.

The program covers patient balance recovery across account age categories, structured payment plan negotiation and administration, financial hardship identification and program enrollment, patient financing coordination, and enhanced accounts receivable management for balances that have cleared insurance adjudication but remain unpaid on the patient side.

Pricing: How It Works

Collections is priced on results: a contingency recovery fee applied only to balances actually recovered, with a $250 monthly minimum. You pay the recovery fee or $250, whichever is greater, never both. The percentage applies only to dollars that actually come in — not to balances attempted or worked.

The $250 monthly minimum is a floor, not an extra charge: once recovery fees pass $250 in a month, you pay only the percentage. Pricing is the same whether collections is added to an existing RCM relationship or bundled inside the Growth Package; what the Growth Package adds is a half-point lower RCM rate at every tier.

Standalone vs. Growth Package

Why This Isn't a Standard Collection Agency

The typical referral to an outside collection agency happens after 90–120 days of failed internal follow-up, at a data handoff with significant friction, and at a cost of 25–40% of whatever the outside agency recovers. The agency has no relationship with the patient, no context on their account history, and no coordination with your billing operation. What they recover, they recover for a larger cut than Sharp charges, with more damage to the patient relationship.

Sharp's Collections program begins working patient balances from the moment they clear insurance adjudication — not after internal failure. It operates under the same principal who knows the patient's payer history, authorization record, and denial context. Payment plans are negotiated with full visibility into what the practice can reasonably expect to collect. Financial hardship applications are evaluated with context no outside agency would have.

The result is higher recovery rates on the balances that can be recovered, and a cleaner patient experience on the ones that can't — because the practice's own team is managing the conversation, not a third party the patient has never heard of.