Accounts receivable (A/R)
Accounts receivable (A/R) is the money owed to a provider for care already delivered but not yet collected — from payers and from patients.
Updated
Accounts receivable (A/R) is the total value of care a provider has billed but not yet been paid for — the balances still open with payers and patients after services are delivered. It is the revenue “in the pipeline” between the visit and the collected payment.
A/R is typically monitored by age, in buckets such as 0–30, 31–60, 61–90, and over 90 days, because the older a balance grows, the less likely it is to be collected.
In practice
Working aged A/R promptly is a core back-end discipline, and the measures are published rather than improvised: HFMA's MAP Keys carry aged A/R as a percentage of total billed A/R and by payer group (AR-1 through AR-4) and net days in A/R (FM-1). HFMA’s guidance on classifying and valuing receivables adds the harder point — that “both revenue and receivables should be valued on the basis of the amount that a payer has an obligation to pay”, not on the billed charge, so A/R measured against charges overstates what is actually collectible.
Commonly confused with
- Days in A/R: Days in A/R is the metric that measures how long A/R takes to collect; A/R is the open balance itself.
- Write-off: A write-off removes an uncollectible balance from A/R; A/R is the balance while it is still open and being worked.