By Jaeme Adams, CEO, SwervePay Health
Twitter: @SwervePayHealth
Visit them at HIMSS Booth #14037 in the Revenue Cycle Pavilion &
Booth #69 in the HX360 Innovation Pavilion
Despite emerging as the second largest payer group in healthcare, patients are rarely recognized as “customers” by provider organizations. It’s an oversight that has resulted in an estimated $150 million going uncollected every year. That’s half of all patient payments left on the table, in large part because healthcare organizations fail to properly leverage consumers’ preferences for online and mobile communications when it comes to collecting patient payments.
This failure is not due to a lack of effort. Many hospitals and practices have attempted to turn the revenue tide by introducing payment capabilities into patient-facing technologies such as portals and mobile apps. Utilization, however, has fallen short. Xerox, in its annual survey on use of electronic health records systems, found that a whopping 64 percent of patients weren’t using portals.
Mobiles apps aren’t faring any better. Accenture reports that while 66 percent of the 100 largest U.S. hospitals offer mobile apps, patient uptake is a dismal 2 percent.
This apathy can be partially blamed on the complexity of interacting with today’s patient-facing technologies, which typically require software installation followed by a multi-step registration process requiring entry of such data as social security numbers and birth dates, followed by login credentials for ongoing access. It’s a “soup to nuts” approach that has deterred many patients from making full or even partial use of these valuable tools.
Also coming into play is the industry’s legacy attachment to lengthy paper trails, which aren’t automatically streamlined once made available via apps or portals. The more providers a patient sees, the more complicated it becomes to pay bills.
Proven Success
When it comes to patient financial engagement, success lies with simplicity. Separate payments from PHI on the front end for the patient’s sake and leverage interfaces on the back end to get the information wherever it needs to be.
Strip payment interactions down to the basics by eliminating complicated download, installation, registration and login processes in favor of a single text message that lets patients securely submit payments. Staunch the flow of paper and electronic bills and statements that are flooding patients’ mailboxes and forcing them to wade through multiple invoice numbers to get to the screen where they can finally submit payment.
The effectiveness of getting back to basics can be seen in our own client base. Providers organizations of all sizes report an increase in collections by as much as 15 percent. Substantial savings is also realized by the elimination of costs associated with traditional billing and collections. Further, by refocusing personnel on mission-critical patient care responsibilities, productivity and quality goes up, taking patient volumes with it.
Leveraging the patients’ preference for online and/or mobile communications by engaging them with a simple text message also serves another important role: it establishes the provider’s technical credibility, which in turn creates a conduit to broader, more innovative patient engagement strategies.
For example, when patients’ confidence is won over by the ease of text-based payment submission, the platform can easily be expanded to include:
- Appointment reminders, which significantly reduce costly no-shows
- Pre-payment of co-pays, increasing collections, reducing bad debt and speeding check-in for greater overall productivity
- Payment plans, which can be initiated by text message and set up in near real-time.
Beyond the revenue cycle, this technical credibility and solid patient-provider relationship also sets the stage for broader adoption and participation in population health and other similar initiatives that function more efficiently with a mobile component.
Leveraging text messaging to accelerate the revenue cycle and establish technical credibility will be the topic of two presentations during HIMSS16:
- “No app required: A text can boost revenue, reduce costs” will take place on Tuesday March 1 from 10-10:20 a.m. PST in the HX360 Innovation Pavilion Theater. I’ll explore how simplifying the payment process by replacing apps, portals and repetitive paper statements with a simple text message for payment can increase revenues and strengthen patient loyalty.
- “Empowering Patients to Optimize the Revenue Cycle” takes place on Wednesday, March 2 from 11:30 a.m.-Noon PST in the Revenue Cycle Pavilion Theater. I’ll examine patient payment challenges and highlight how the right patient-centric payment tools can increase collections while reducing both bad debt write-offs and administrative/statement costs.
We will also be demonstrating our patient-centric, app- and portal-free payment platform in Booth #14037 in the Revenue Cycle Pavilion and in Booth #69 in the HX360 Innovation Pavilion.