Old AR recovery
Old AR recovery is a focused effort to work through legacy accounts receivable, often inherited from a prior billing arrangement, before timely filing limits close them out permanently.
Follows ar follow-up. Feeds into patient statements and patient support.
Where practices lose money here
Timely filing limits are closing in
Old AR has a shelf life. Every day it sits unworked moves it closer to a filing deadline after which it becomes permanently uncollectible.
No one has triaged what is actually recoverable
Old AR piles are usually a mix of genuinely collectible claims and dead ones. Without triage, staff time gets spent evenly across both instead of concentrated on what can still be recovered.
How we handle it
Take over legacy AR from a prior biller or in-house team as a defined, separate workstream from current billing.
Assess timely filing limits claim by claim to determine what is still within a recoverable window.
Triage the full AR pile into recoverable, appealable, and truly dead categories before committing full effort.
Work recoverable claims on a contingency basis, so the practice is not paying fixed fees to chase balances that may not come back.
Report recovery progress separately from ongoing AR so the practice can see the legacy cleanup as its own project.
What you receive
Concrete output for this step, delivered on a set schedule rather than on request.
- A triage report categorizing the old AR pile by recoverability.
- A recovery progress report tracked against the original pile value.
Where this sits in the cycle
Old AR recovery is a one-time cleanup project rather than an ongoing cycle step. It is typically run alongside onboarding, so the account starts clean once regular AR follow-up takes over.
Questions about this step
Is there a cutoff on how old AR can be and still be worked?
It depends on the payer’s timely filing limit, which varies. We assess this claim by claim rather than applying a blanket cutoff.
How is this priced differently from regular AR follow-up?
Old AR recovery is typically contingency-based, a percentage of what is actually recovered, since the collectibility of the pile is unknown until it is triaged.
Want us to review how this is handled in your practice right now?
The free billing audit looks at old ar recovery alongside the rest of the cycle, and comes back with specific findings.