NCO’s Eligibility Patient Advocacy Liaison Services (EPALS) enhances revenue by providing federal, state and jurisdictional assistance programs to the uninsured and underinsured population of healthcare providers through onsite and offsite screening, ED staffing, extended office hours and field visits.
Experience
For more than 28 years, NCO has provided eligibility assistance to hospitals and their patients.
Reach
NCO provides EPALS services to more than 275 clients in over 28 states. This large client base enables NCO to promptly reach transient patients.
Patient Type
NCO provides onsite and offsite EPALS services for Inpatient, Outpatient and Emergency Department accounts. Providing onsite staffing in the ED is critical to achieve maximum certification.
Patient Contact
Onsite representatives conduct bedside interviews to determine eligibility, while offsite representatives contact patients by letter and telephone.
Multi-Lingual Staff
90% of our 300 EPALS staff is bi-lingual/multi-lingual.
Extended Hours
NCO provides onsite and offsite staffing during the hours that are reflective of hospital volume. Screeners are available seven days a week, beyond traditional hours. Extended staffing hours are also provided in the ED.
Skiptracing
NCO representatives search through our internal database of 80 million records, supplemented by data provided by the leading national vendors.
Field Representatives
NCO EPALS representatives coordinate DHS appointments, document acquisition, transportations to DHS and SSA appointments, recordkeeping efforts and other follow-up efforts to get patients certified. Representatives accompany patients to interviews, evaluate cases and obtain signatures and help ensure that applications are completed in a timely manner.
Denials
NCO EPALS has processes in place to overturn denials. NCO EPALS representatives do all of the research, request appeals, assist patients with documentation and help them get to their hearings. NCO EPALS even covers the costs associated with the additional forms and documentation needed for the hearings.