In the past, patient satisfaction centered on care during a visit. Improving patient experiences during check-in, billing, and payment wasn’t a consideration.
Now, healthcare systems and hospitals need to focus on improving the entire patient experience throughout their customer journey—including their financial experience.
For the extended business office (EBO) or medical billing staff who collects on patient payments, how does the patient experience in healthcare fit into your daily workflow?
What do you need to consider when choosing digital tools to engage and collect from patients?
What is Patient Experience and Why is it Important?
What is the patient experience? Companies know that positive interactions create customer loyalty. How patients interact with your organization works the same way.
The patient experience in healthcare is essential to positive reviews and brand loyalty.
Patients often have more than one choice for medical services. If someone is dissatisfied with their experience at a healthcare facility (whether related to their care or not) they’ll go elsewhere or leave a negative review.
A misunderstanding about a bill or a confusing payment system can be the difference between repeat patients and losing business.
Who is responsible for the patient experience in healthcare?
The whole team—from receptionists to medical professionals to accounts receivable—need to prioritize the patient experience.
Healthcare clients can also rely on EBOs or medical billing companies to improve the patient experience and manage medical billing, payment collection, and other administrative services.
Outsourcing to a third party debt collector or extended business office ensures billing matters are handled with care by experienced professionals.
Whether your company is a collection agency, an EBO, or managing patient bills in-house, improving the patient experience starts with understanding the patient journey.
Understanding the Patient Journey to Create a Positive Patient Experience
Your medical billing staff doesn’t encounter patients until the end of their medical care journey. It can be easy to overlook a bad care experience they had during a visit by the time they need to pay.
But a bad encounter can be a blocker to payment.
Your organization should understand what patients have been through during care and know their preferences for how to pay.
Empathy helps you engage these patients sooner and improve the patient experience.
PAIN POINTS IN THE PATIENT BILLING JOURNEY
High-deductible healthcare plans mean patients are involved in the revenue cycle much longer and more extensively than in the past.
Along with this, patients are responsible for more of their own medical costs, and may not have a complete understanding of what is or isn’t covered by insurance.
Many also don’t understand the concept of an extended business office or other third party medical billing relationships.
These issues can hurt the patient experience in healthcare but there are ways to address these pain points.
- Operate as a seamless extension of your client’s office.
- Practice empathetic communication during payment collections. People who have undergone medical procedures may be under physical and financial stress at the time of payment. Train staff to be respectful of the difficulties patients may be experiencing.
- Provide clear communication to patients about what portion of their service they are financially responsible to pay.
- Train your staff in financial aid counseling and early intervention practices. If a patient can’t afford their bill or needs to set up a recurring payment schedule, agents should be able to identify those scenarios early, before bills become seriously overdue.
Improving the Patient Experience in Medical Billing
One of the best ways to improve the patient experience is by identifying how patients want to interact with you and offering them what they want. Retail and other businesses have set the bar for how consumers and companies interact.
Learn from the digital tools they offer, while identifying the specific needs a patient may have while resolving medical bills. This will help you decide what is most valuable for your EBO or medical billing collections company.
DIGITAL PATIENT ENGAGEMENT (AND RE-ENGAGEMENT)
Due to the pandemic, patients and facilities looked for ways to interact without always being face-to-face. With the way our world now operates, digital options are more than a safety precaution—they’re an adaptation to modern life, and they’re here to stay.
For example, patients find it more convenient to pay a bill online rather than stopping by the doctor’s office.
Thankfully, there are many digital areas where you can engage consumers in the payment process or re-engage those who have fallen out of contact.
Areas of Patient Engagement in the Billing Process
Improving the patient experience starts as early as check-in. Work with your healthcare clients to find out if or when they gain consent for such things as:
- Emails
- Text messages
- Electronic vs. paper billing
Whenever possible, you and your healthcare clients should work together to set billing and payment expectations early.
Collecting communication consents, telling them how and where they will be billed, and providing resources for financial aid and payment schedules can all engage patients.
Re-engagement and Retaining Patients
Medical payment services can sometimes be a long process. Insurance approvals may take time to come through, billing cycles can be long, and other life events may cause patients to put off payment.
Digital tools can be a great way to re-engage patients in their bill or nudge them towards payment before delinquency.
PDCflow’s features are designed to keep payers engaged throughout the billing cycle. We offer:
- Email or SMS document delivery: If a patient can’t remember why they’re being charged, or has questions about their bill, they may want documentation. PDCflow email/SMS delivery keeps the conversation going by sending documents instantly.
- Automated Payment reminders: Patients with payment schedules should be notified before a transaction is charged. Others might forget about an upcoming bill and need a second reminder. PDCflow automated payment reminders keep patients informed of upcoming charges or nudge people to pay before a due date passes.
- Flexible recurring schedules: Pay periods can be anywhere from bi-monthly, bi-weekly to weekly. Payment plans should have the same variability. Patients who can choose their payment plan are more likely to make payments regularly. PDCflow flexible payment schedules are flexible for both you and your patients.
Leveraging PDCflow's Digital Billing Tools
You are of higher value to clients, and are more likely to win future business if your office uses digital tools that speed up the revenue cycle and increase the amount you collect.
What digital offerings do revenue cycle managers and healthcare providers want from their outsourcing vendors?
What should your billing service look for to make office workflows easier for front line staff and back office staff?
Customizable, Flexible Options
Your payment software needs to be customizable and flexible to meet your unique business needs.
For example, some patients may only require a payment request sent to text or email.
However, other situations may require electronic document delivery, photo or file uploads, an esignature, and payment requests all at the same time.
PDCflow’s payment, document, and esignature software can accomplish all of this in one workflow.
Different departments may also have different requirements or levels of permission. Our system allows you to control staff access to functionality by departments, groups, or even physical locations.
Flexible recurring payments are also essential to healthcare organizations. PDCflow’s recurring schedules can be staff or patient-created, and have a number of customization options to control timing, cadence, and length of these plans.
Offer Patient Control
Putting patients in control of their financial responsibility is the best way to increase payments.
When they know where to look for information and receive it where it’s most convenient, they will become more engaged in their financial experience.
- Communication preferences: Patients should be able to choose their communication preferences including email and text. PDCflow lets you send fast, convenient payment requests for easier collection.
- Payment options: Payment channels and flexible recurring payment schedules improve the payment experience. PDCflow offers credit card, ACH, and cash tracking, payment portals, email and SMS requests, QR code payment links, and cashier-initiated payments.
- Easy workflows: PDCflow’s simple workflows are easy for staff to initiate and are even easier for patients to navigate.
Frictionless Payments
Friction is anything that may slow down or stop a patient from paying. Many consumers will abandon a payment if there are too many steps involved, or navigation is too complex. If this happens with a medical bill, consumers may forget about their obligation for weeks – or even months.
Websites should be easy to navigate. Payment buttons should be easy for patients to find and the steps to make a payment should be minimal and intuitive. Patients should also be able to opt for email and text payments “pushed” to them, rather than having to take action.
Choosing the Right Digital Payment Vendor
Your digital payment vendor should be willing to listen to your needs and help you offer the best solutions and workflows for your office, your clients and their patients.
At PDCflow, we know there isn’t one solution that will solve every patient's pain point. We understand the struggles of improving the patient experience and offer flexible, configurable features to help you adapt.
We also provide ways to integrate your payments with the other products you use for your business, like EMR and ARM software.
Via our open APIs, your payment tools and reporting information can be accessible from your existing system of record.
PDCflow has almost two decades of experience working with EBOs, medical billing companies, healthcare clients and other accounts receivable businesses, fine-tuning workflows to provide a better payment experience.
We offer text and email communications, esignature solutions, flexible payment schedules, and payment portals – among other tools – that create a better way to pay.
Our open APIs allow our software to communicate with other systems so workflows, reporting and other features can all be accessed in one place.
Along with this, organizational management tools allows administrators to open up or lock down access at many levels to make work easier, restrict access to information as needed, and reduce the likelihood of human error caused by access to unnecessary information.
For more information on the benefits of early out collections, how they are enhanced by an extended business office model, and how PDCflow’s Flow Technology can solve common payment failures, set up a demo today.
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- 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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