Digital patient engagement strategies are important for collecting more healthcare payments, sending modern communications, and getting faster esignatures.
But it’s up to your healthcare facility to thoughtfully approach each patient’s digital experience. From check-in to payment, processes must be fast, secure, and simple to use.
How can you increase digital patient engagement and improve administrative processes at the same time?
Three of the simplest areas that can improve a patient’s experience with your facility are:
- HIPAA compliant document sharing
- Modern payments for better patient financial engagement
- Using digital communication channels for reminders and requests
Patient Engagement Strategies for HIPAA Compliant Documents
Complying with HIPAA is essential any time facilities share sensitive patient information. Because of this, many healthcare practices use outdated channels like mail or fax for document sharing.
Personal fax machines are nonexistent, and sending documents by mail slows everything down. If a patient needs quick details about a bill they owe, or you want to request an esignature, this is a problem.
PDCflow’s HIPAA compliant software is ideal for secure esignature and payment requests, or quick document delivery.
Increase digital patient engagement, save time, and make it easier to resolve accounts with secure, HIPAA compliant request software. With PDCflow, patients can:
- Receive itemized copies of an invoice while on the phone with a billing specialist.
- Receive, sign, and return your HIPAA policy forms.
- Securely upload and send you a photo of an insurance card or file ahead of a patient visit.
Your healthcare system can also use PDCflow’s HIPAA compliant requests to share digital records with other offices, or onboard patients and staff.
Faster Payments Through Digital Patient Engagement
Digital engagement strategies (like email and text requests) are convenient for office staff and cost less than paper, postage, and letter vendors.
Most importantly, sending email and text payment requests improves patient engagement. In other words, if you make the process easier for patients, more of them will pay.
Digital Payment Options to Serve Every Patient
Convenient, self-serve options empower patients and get you paid faster. But everyone is different.
That’s why you need to offer an omnichannel experience for patient payments. Providing as many options as possible means everyone can choose what works for them.
This increases the amount of payments you’ll receive and speeds up how quickly patients resolve their bills. Here are some of the most useful digital payment options to engage patients:
- Online payment portal: Offer a quick pay online payment option that doesn’t require logging into a patient account. PDCflow offers customizable payment portals for fast self-serve patient payments.
- Text message and email payments: Many patients want bills sent through text or email. PDCflow lets you send secure email and text payment requests that require two-factor authentication, for convenience and security.
- Flexible recurring payment schedules: PDCflow offers flexible options for payment amounts, schedule length, and number of payments per month. Admins can adjust minimum payment amount and schedule length. Let patients set up self-serve recurring payment schedules through online portals for even more convenience.
- Automated payment reminders: Set up an automated reminder to go out before a payment request expires, so you can give another nudge to patients who haven’t paid.
Recurring Billing Software
Key Features
How PDCflow Helps
Get fast approvals for your recurring schedules with PDCflow.
Send payment consent requests via email or SMS for recurring payment schedules, and receive an esignature in minutes.
PDCflow’s recurring payment schedules automatically send a payment reminder.
Specify how many days before a scheduled payment a reminder should be sent.
Reminders include payment details and contact information.
PDCflow offers many options to customize a payment plan that works for your customers.
Choose:
- how frequently payments are processed.
- whether the plan is created using a set payment amount or length of the terms.
- whether to add fees to the payments.
Control the minimum amount any customer is allowed to pay per installment.
Use this global setting to ensure your payment schedules still bring in revenue in the short term.
Control the length of time customers can take to pay the full balance.
Cap how long any recurring schedule can run by limiting the number of payments or length of time customers can choose.
PDCflow makes it easier for your company to adhere to Payment Compliance Industry standards.
Our software captures and stores payment data for businesses, so you don’t have to.
Modern Communication Channels for Digital Patient Engagement
Digital patient engagement should focus on more than just payments.
Medical practices can use software like PDCflow to speed up patient experiences. Streamline the way your office staff sends out requests. Use PDCflow to send digital messages so you can:
- Reduce manual phone conversations that take up time (and are often ineffective).
- Make check-in faster by emailing or texting forms and paperwork ahead of a visit.
- Save staff time by offering an easy, all-in-one system to send documents, request esignatures and payments, and automatically track a request’s progress.
- Interact with patients through their preferred digital channel, so they are more likely to engage.
- Reduce human error by letting administrators control which department, group, or location can access specific message templates, reporting, or functionality.
Opt-in and Opt-out Tracking
When you provide digital communication channels like email and text, it’s important to honor patient preferences and opt-ins/opt-outs.
Digital requests (instead of a phone call or paper invoice) are a great way to cater to patients. But that’s only true if you follow what channel they opt into.
It’s important to know (and track) how people want their information. Sending notifications through a channel they don’t pay attention to will cause payments to slow down or fail.
If your office doesn’t properly update these preferences, you risk damaging the patient relationship. Satisfaction will degrade with every notice sent through the wrong channel.
Use opt-out reports to manage preferences and preference tracking. This will keep your revenue cycle running smoothly and decrease late or delinquent payments.
PDCflow for Effective Digital Patient Engagement
PDCflow makes it easier for medical offices to manage digital documents, send payment requests and reminders, and request photo and file uploads from patients.
Here’s what we have to offer:
Key Features
How PDCflow Helps
Integrating PDCflow’s Digital Patient Engagement Platform
PDCflow’s user interface is easy to use, and comes with free onboarding training from our support team.
However, bigger healthcare organizations might want to integrate features into an existing system of record for easy access.
PDCflow offers open APIs with easy drop-in and low-code components for simple integration. We also offer dedicated integration support and a demo sandbox environment to organizations that may need it.
Want to see how PDCflow can boost patient engagement for your medical facility? Sign up for a demo today:
Book Demo:
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Hannah Huerta, Marketing Specialist
Hannah Huerta is a Marketing Specialist at PDCflow. She creates content for the accounts receivable and payment industry.
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