For Geary Community bad debt continues to be an issue.

Last year the hospital added nearly $500,000 to its’ bad debt, of which only a small portion is collected. Bad debt is money owed to the hospital from people who are not in a position to make their co-pays or deductables.

Hospital CEO Dr. Joseph Stratton discussed how the bad debt situation can be improved. “Well the way you improve it, ask for patients to pay their copay and deductables up front when they first receive service instead of trying to bill them on it later.” Stratton added officials have talked about moving in that direction,” with more aggressive collections up front at the point of service.”

Stratton said the other thing is to try and do a better job of collecting money on the back side from the patient population that’s out there.

He noted quite a bit of bad expense has been written off in the past two month. “It’s more of an accounting function than anything else, in some sense.”