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? …
Strategies to Improve Medical Billing Collection Results
Medical billing collection is a challenging business. Whether you are a debt collection agency, an extended business office, or the accounts receivable department that manages healthcare collections, many struggles are the same. Bad medical collection practices can damage a healthcare facility’s reputation. Bad internal communication can impact medical billing collection results. Poor patient education can cause lower healthcare collection numbers. …
Patient Collections: Best Practices for Faster Payments
Healthcare and medical billing offices lag behind many other industries in adopting payment software for patient collections. Concerns over HIPAA compliance, patient responsibilities, and software integration often delay patient billing and revenue collection system adoption—but they shouldn’t. The key to improving patient collections in healthcare is implementing a HIPAA-compliant, automated patient collection software that integrates into your revenue cycle management …
Modern Tactics for Faster Patient Payments
High deductible plans and health savings accounts create more patient payment responsibility than ever before. Meanwhile, HIPAA compliance (and other hospital and health system operations) can lead to confusing patient payment solutions. How do we fine-tune back office processes and your patient’s experience together? By optimizing the patient journey from before check-in to billing and payment. This requires good pre-planning, …
Improving Patient Experience: Tips for Medical Billing Staff
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 …
Protect Patient Data with HIPAA Compliant eSignatures
Healthcare organizations that handle patient data must follow strict rules to keep this information private and secure. If you are a medical office, handle medical billing or insurance, or manage health information in any other way, you should already understand what HIPAA compliance entails. But in an increasingly digital world, sending medical records, collecting form authorizations, and other office processes …
Data Protection and Privacy Concerns in the Remote Work Era
This article was originally written by Privacy Attorney, Leslie Bender and published in October, 2020. It has recently been updated and republished. As the number of folks working from home has skyrocketed during the pandemic, the effects of being more digitally connected have been both good and bad. Reports of suspected attacks by cybercriminals to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s …
4 Pillars of Empathetic Communication in Healthcare Finance
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, “empathy” and “compassion” have been buzzwords in almost every industry. People are craving the human connection and understanding that comes with empathy, which is why now more than ever, understanding compassionate, empathetic communication is extremely important. For organizations that collect healthcare payments, having empathetic communication skills should be part of your company policies. …
EBOs and the Patient Experience in Healthcare Billing
The patient experience in healthcare billing is an essential (often overlooked) part of the healthcare revenue cycle. Every medical organization understands that patients need to feel involved in their care during medical services but don’t always extend that importance when it’s time for patients to pay. As an extended business office (EBO) for a healthcare organization, what does the patient …
Enhancing Your Early Out Collection Strategy
As accounts receivable professionals know, early out collection (also known as pre-collection) is a typical practice to resolve healthcare bills and other late customer payments. It helps organizations shorten the revenue cycle and settle accounts as quickly as possible. Extended business offices also reduce overhead expenses for the companies your EBO is working with. EBO tactics help companies intervene before …
Top 5 Reasons Extended Business Offices Fail to Collect Past Due Payments
Working with a client as an extension of their business can be challenging. If you currently run (or are considering running) an extended business office, you may already know the challenges involved. However, between compliance, staff training and other back-office concerns, it can be hard to manage the roadblocks your agents experience during payment collection. If your business is interested …
Managing Remote Staff in Healthcare Collections Long-Term
It has been a few months since companies transitioned their staff out of offices. By now, the immediate struggles of changing on-site employees into remote workers have been resolved. Now, healthcare collections and other accounts receivable businesses are starting to realize that managing remote staff may be a long term necessity. No one knows how long the Coronavirus pandemic will …
