Lowering bad debt in health care: the cure is easier than you think.

In the year 2000 alone, according to one estimate, the health-care industry wrote off more than $20 billion in bad debt. Often, lack of patient payment is because the bill never reached the patient. In our mobile society, a current address is harder to find. Compound this with the fact that laboratories often receive information from clinics and hospitals that is incorrect or incomplete, and one begins to see the problem. Through learning about Internet-based search tools, health-care workers will recognize that incorrect billing information--the source of many unpaid bills--easily is corrected inexpensively, at a fraction of the cost of previous solutions.