Funding by industry
Medical practice funding: who pays you and when
Your patients are not the ones paying you. Insurers are, thirty to ninety days after the visit, and not always the amount you billed. Almost every funding review is built around businesses that get paid at the point of sale, which is why a busy practice can still read as thin on paper.
Elora is not a lender, bank or broker. We coordinate: we prepare the file and introduce it to appropriate funding sources, who make every credit decision. Nothing here is an offer, a rate quote or a guarantee of approval.
Payer mix decides more than patient volume
Two practices billing the same amount can have completely different cash arrival, because who reimburses them is not the same question as how much they bill. That is the first thing to make legible in the file.
- Commercial, Medicare and Medicaid pay on different clocks. A practice weighted toward one behaves nothing like a practice weighted toward another, and a reviewer who cannot see the mix will assume the slower one.
- Billed is not collected. Contractual adjustments mean the amount that arrives is routinely less than the amount submitted. A file that leads with gross billings invites a question it could have answered.
- Denials and resubmissions stretch the timeline invisibly. A claim in its second cycle is not late revenue, it is revenue at risk, and the ageing report is where that difference shows.
- Patient responsibility has grown. High-deductible plans push a share of collection onto the patient, which behaves like retail credit rather than insurance receivable, a genuinely different risk and worth naming.
The documents that actually move a practice file
The goal is to let a reviewer see the shape of your reimbursement without asking three rounds of questions.
| Document | Why it is asked for |
|---|---|
| Business bank statements - last 4 months | Where everything else is checked. Shows the true deposit rhythm, which for a practice is lumpier than the appointment book suggests. |
| Accounts receivable ageing, broken down by payer | The single most useful document, and the one most often sent as a single total. Split by payer it answers the timing question outright. |
| A summary of payer mix | One page showing the share of revenue by payer type. Turns an assumption about your cash timing into something the reviewer can read. |
| Professional licences and the practice entity details | Confirms who is authorised to practise and to sign. Multi-provider practices stall here more often than anywhere else. |
Send reports, not records. A reviewer needs the ageing and the mix, never chart notes or anything identifying a patient, and a file that arrives with protected health information in it creates a problem for both sides.
Which structures tend to fit and which rarely do
The question every structure has to survive is a month where claims are submitted, staff is paid, and nothing has been reimbursed yet.
| Structure | How it behaves |
|---|---|
| Receivables-backed funding | Advances against reimbursements already earned, so it tracks the actual gap rather than a generic revenue estimate. Rewards clean ageing; punishes a file that cannot evidence what is owed. |
| Equipment financing | For a chair, an imaging unit or a laser, the equipment secures the transaction, so the review leans on the asset. Frequently the most accessible route for a younger practice. |
| Business line of credit | The closest match to how the problem behaves: draw while claims are outstanding, repay as they land. The hardest to qualify for, and it expects organised books. |
| Daily-remittance advance | Fast, and sometimes the only option available, but a fixed daily debit against reimbursements that arrive in batches is a real mismatch. Worth entering with the timing understood. |
We do not publish rates, amounts or terms. Those are set by the funding source for your specific file, and any figure quoted before underwriting would be a guess. How these structures differ, in plain English →
Why practice files stall
In our experience preparing files, most delays are not credit decisions. They are gaps that could have been closed before submission.
- Ageing sent as one number. Without the payer breakdown the reviewer cannot distinguish a slow payer from a bad debt.
- Personal and practice banking mixed. Very common in solo practices, and it makes the cash rhythm unreadable.
- A billing company holds the data. Perfectly normal, but it adds a week if nobody asked them for the reports before the file went out.
- An existing advance already debiting daily. Visible in the statements. Disclosing it keeps the file with sources that permit it.
What happens if you start a review
You answer a short intake, upload documents through a secure portal, and a person — not an automated score — reads the file and tells you what is strong, what is missing and which kinds of funding source are a realistic fit. No upfront fees, and nothing at this stage affects your credit. If we cannot help, we say so.