RCM Operations...this one’s for you

We talk about our results often. For us, we know it’s a real differentiator and a clear indicator of an effective solution.  If you want to capture more patient payments OR need to drive down the time and cost to capture them, we know we can deliver on all these fronts (as we have shown time and time again). 

But there are other ways to measure effectiveness that make for a successful RCM partnership.  A good partner isn’t blind to the fact that a good ROI doesn’t make up for the operational challenges that can often come with a new partnership.  Improved outcomes shouldn’t come at the expense of a frustrated staff and dissatisfied patients. We probably haven’t shouted enough about these other things.  Well, that’s what this is for… 

While optimizing patient payment results will remain our #1 focus, below is a description of additional measures that our RCM partners have identified to greatly improve the efficiency of your operations. 

Decreased Call Volume

There are a quite few potential issues that can lead to a high volume of patient calls, but a really important one that we see is a lack of true self-service payment options.  Self-service payment success is a great barometer for other aspects of your patient billing process.  Every self-service online payment is an indicator that a patient was successfully driven to view their bill, they  understood their statement, agreed with their balance, and were presented with the payment options they needed to take action.   

A recent study by Visa on U.S. consumer payments showed that 82% of consumers were either Very Likely or Extremely Likely to seek self-service online payment options before contacting the biller.  Makes sense, nobody wants to talk to a stranger about their individual financial circumstances.  

In looking at payments from our busiest time of the day (which happens to be between noon and 1 PM in each respective time zone), 78% of the payments being made are online, self-service by the patient.  That’s more than ¾ of payments that don’t require a staff’s time and are either paid in full or set up on an automated payment plan.  That means 78% of patient accounts with no more follow-up action needed. 

Not all payments are created equal

We hear it all the time, “We’re just happy if we can get the patient to pay any amount.”  In fact, a lot of organizations promote their payment conversion rates based on any type of payment, regardless of whether it's partial, full or scheduled.  We’re here to tell you that partial payments are to be avoided if you want to ensure a smooth operation.  

Patients will more often than not choose the path of least resistance.  Even patients who are fully-capable of paying the full balance will choose to pay just a piece of the amount if given the option.  The more partial payments you have, the more opportunity for reconciliation headaches and the more additional follow-up that has to be done for the remaining balance.  

Success, to us, is actually completing a balance, not just collecting part of it.  Out of all our transactions, over 80% are made for the full payment amount.  The other 20% are payments either scheduled to auto draft on a future date or installments as part of an automated payment plan.  All represent current or future guaranteed revenue, unlike partial payments which represent guaranteed confusion and efforts for your staff. 

Intelligent reporting and bill history

What about for those patients who do have questions and need to talk to someone about their bill?  A big part of maximizing your staff’s efficiency and minimizing the average call time is making sure your staff has the tools to understand what’s going on and to take a certain action.  

When was the bill in question created?  When and via what method has it been delivered/reminded to the patient?  What actions has the patient already taken with the bill?  Have they already been to the payment screen and attempted to execute a payment or set up a plan?  

An efficient and helpful conversation requires all of these answers to be presented in one place and alongside the same bill the patient is referencing.  Furthermore, your staff should have the ability to send electronic bills to the patient, in-real-time, while they have them on the line.  Or better yet, execute a payment on their behalf with minimal clicks.    

Healthcare Patient Payments in 2020 and Beyond

How PatientPay is Leading the Healthcare Patient Payments Sphere

Whoever said “complex problems require complex solutions” must have never worked in healthcare patient payments. Although we live in the digital age where connecting, contacting, and sending information is as easy as the click of a button, some things still remain difficult: namely, getting patients to pay their bill while adhering to compliance standards (such as HIPAA, PCI, TCPA, etc.) that seem to limit your options for improvement. 

So, how do we achieve both?

Healthcare Patient Payments: Simplicity is Key

“Simplify, simplify.” — Henry David Thoreau 

Simplicity, as it turns out, is the name of the game. Studies show that 2 of the top 8 reasons for shopping cart abandonment in eCommerce are because the user either didn’t want to register/create an account just to make a purchase or because their preferred payment option wasn’t available. Now, if those are the abandonment rates for people wanting to spend money, just imagine the drop off in collected payments for those paying a medical bill. We’ll wait…

That’s where PatientPay comes in: we understand that the more clicks, the more hurdles, and the more registration screens it takes for a patient to view their bill, the less likely they are to pay it. We’ve streamlined that process to give providers and their revenue cycle partners the best chance at capturing payments while also providing a successful patient-focused billing solution.

See why PatientPay is the leading technology partner for Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) companies looking to capture more payments, faster and at a lower cost.

Healthcare Patient Payments: Opt-In vs. Opt-Out

Where most healthcare patient payment providers go wrong is by using an opt-in method for sending electronic communications and receiving payment. There are a few problems with this:

• The chain of communications is almost always started with snail mail (of which there is no way to measure read-rate or open-rate).

• Of those patients who actually receive and open their snail mail, their next step is to go online and register just to view another impossible to understand bill.

• For the few patients that have finally made it this far, the platforms being used typically don’t offer creative payment options or billing schedules. 

As you can imagine, in this opt-in model, more and more patients are being lost at every step. That equates to less reach, less payment interactions, and less money in your pocket. 

At PatientPay, we take a different approach by using our advanced dunning engine to leverage an opt-out model, making calculated assumptions that most patients are perfectly alright with receiving a digital message from their provider (spoiler alert: most are okay with it).  So why text and email initially instead of paper? Glad you asked! 

Healthcare Patient Payments: Using the Right Tools

Achieving success with healthcare patient payment hinges on using the most effective tools to get the job done, which is why we leverage text messages as a focus of our communication efforts. SMS (text messages) receive a 4x greater open-rate than traditional email marketing, and electronic communications and billing texts have a 99% read-rate.

PatientPay makes the most of this by using text messages as a vehicle to warm up communications with the patient in lieu of or before sending over a patient statement, resulting in a much higher conversion rate. 

We know what you might be thinking, “But what about privacy?” As it turns out, it is perfectly okay for providers to send text messages to patients — it’s HIPAA-compliant as long as there aren’t any “personal identifiers” in the text message and TCPA compliant as long as you are offering the appropriate opt-out channels. This works great because the text itself only serves as a vehicle to drive more patients to pay. 

Simplicity, security, and using the right tools — this is the PatientPay recipe that’s put us at the forefront of healthcare patient payments. What do you think? Wouldn’t you like to capture more patient payments, faster and at a lower cost? Ask us how. 

Thinking of PatientPay as your RCM patient payments partner? Schedule a Demo today! 

What Does it Mean to be a Healthcare RCM Technology Partner?

The healthcare revenue cycle is a frustratingly complex process spanning from patient scheduling and registration to final balance collections, with at least a dozen different components sandwiched in between.  Every step affects the next, every piece has its own set of compliance and regulations to consider, and there is very little standardization at any level.  It’s much like one of those chain reaction machines, a game of Mouse Trap for example.  Except this particular game set is much like one from 1993 where the instruction manual is torn up, one of the metal balls is missing and the diving board is broken.  The mouse will never get trapped so there’s no payoff in the end. 

That being said, it’s no wonder why healthcare providers seek help from outside RCM service organizations.  It’s the reason why the RCM service provider space is as busy and competitive as ever before.  But given that every step involves so much nuance and a deep understanding of process and technology, can the RCM service providers really be expected to have a handle on every aspect of the RCM cycle?  

Seems like an impossible ask, especially since we strongly believe that to be considered a true ‘expert’ on something you must have a very defined focus and have put in your 10,000 hours to perfect it.  We’ve defined our focus, we’ve put in our 10,000 hours, and we are ready to help you perfect a crucial piece of the healthcare RCM puzzle. 

Our focus

We are not a “patient portal” or just another online bill pay tool for providers to add to their website.  In fact, unlike other RCM technology vendors that are competing with your services, we don’t aim to work directly with healthcare providers at all.   

Instead, we focus on working with RCM service organizations as a partner to help them capture more patient responsibility payments for their provider clients. 

Designed for partnership

How do you best engage with a patient to inform them of a balance?  How do you maximize your chances that a patient views a bill and makes a payment?  How do you ensure that data is accurate, payments are secure, and compliance is being met? 

Being an effective partner in this space requires a lot of nuance.  Nuance requires technology that is flexible, adaptable and built with the understanding that each partner (and each patient) is unique.  The right technology requires years of experience and industry knowledge.  

When we say we are designed for partnership, what we really mean is that we have a deep understanding of the tools and technology that an RCM service organization needs to be effective, and an appreciation of how these tools must work to make their jobs easier (more visibility, fewer phone calls, automated reconciliation).  Their clients will benefit from more patient dollars and a better patient experience, yes, but this is a result of our focus on working with the RCM organization as an extension of their services so that they can capture more patient payments, much faster while operationally becoming much more efficient.   

We have success stories, we have compelling stats, we have a lot of confidence in our solution and we love talking about it.  You’ll see plenty of that in other posts.  This is one, though, hopefully provided a little bit of clarity in a space full of haze and confusion. 

Gettin' Texty

85% of Electronic Payments are made via Mobile Device

A couple months ago we shared a BLOG about standing out amongst the sea of revenue cycle vendors. Looking across that vast expanse these days, you will hear something you didn’t just a short time ago. “Hey providers, we can now send a text-based patient bill!” Let PatientPay, an organization that was focused 100% on electronic patient engagement from our inception, share a little secret with you: The ability to simply send a text is not enough. 

Too often revenue cycle solution providers will subscribe to the react method of product enhancement. We found out the hard way that we needed to offer a well planned, consumer science-based paper statement after avoiding it for a long time. There’s the key. Effectively implementing a tool such as text-based billing needs to be well planned. Why, you ask? Isn’t texting simple? Everyone on earth does it every day. How hard can it be to send a simple text alerting a patient or guarantor to an open balance? Let me share a story.

We have been working with a partner for several months who did a very smart thing by inserting our solution in one line of business, while implementing a competitor in another in order to have a “bake-off” to determine the best long-term strategy. We walked in with our customary push for electronic engagement. Our competitor stuck to their program claiming, people won’t pay from text. But we can do that too. 

We went live, making an immediate impact capturing patient payments at an excellent rate based on our omni-channel engagement strategy. That, of course, includes text-based billing and is a component of our overall (well planned) dunning strategy. After taking several months to get live, our competitor wasn’t driving the same rate of payments. What’s significantly worse is the poorly planned, reactive texting strategy created legal challenges for our partner. Let me share secret number two: If you’re going to offer text-based billing, make sure you understand TCPA regulations. 

For our side of the equation, we’ll let our partner’s words speak for themselves, “PatientPay taught us that texting works. But just texting obviously isn’t enough.” Amen. It must be part of a broader strategy and must be respected. 

Still don’t think text-to-pay will work? One of the keys is to focus on the simple. How do you get patients to click on that link? For 2020, PatientPay is getting a 21% overall click-through rate vs a 2-3% industry average. If you don’t know, the simple explanation is that click-through rates measure how many recipients click the link per message sent. So great, they click. Then what? Now you need to marry simplicity with clarity in order to get someone to use the payment tool.

How is PatientPay doing? We thought you’d never ask. Analyzing data beginning May 1, 2020, we’re getting:

• Initial text: 87% click rate with a 28% pay-from-text rate

• Reminder text: 37% click rate with a 41% pay-from-text rate

• 77% mobile traffic vs desktop

• 85% of electronic payments via mobile device

The bottom line is the right strategy and execution of a text-to-pay strategy will increase your top line and improve your bottom line by increasing self-service. Isn’t that what most well-planned solutions (technology or service-based) should do?

What Kind of Lemonade Stand are you Providing for your Patients?

Now that summer is upon us, here’s a relevant analogy.  Suppose you are tasked with starting a lemonade stand and the goal is to be as profitable as possible.  Would you set up shop in a sparsely populated neighborhood with very little traffic?  To gain customers, would you rely solely on word-of-mouth from the 4 people that drive by all day, hoping that they are thirsty and willing to take the extra steps to stop, find change and chat?  Would you serve watered-down, lukewarm lemonade to ensure that your few customers will never return?  

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I’m inclined to think you might be a fan of flying with Spirit Airlines, or that the Cleveland Browns are a well-run organization (no offense to those at the Cleveland Clinic).  We can all recognize bad business when we see it in other industries.  It’s amazing in healthcare, though, how frequently we see businesses relying on a poorly run lemonade stand to collect a growing portion of their revenue.  

It’s no secret that patients today owe more out of pocket than ever before.  Recognizing this, along with the fact that most consumers prefer to pay online, chances are you’ve already implemented a way for patients to go to your website (or that of a third-party) to make a payment.  You have set up a lemonade stand, and now it’s time to sit back and eat a popsicle while you watch the business roll in.  

Except maybe your experience, like many others, has been that there hasn’t been nearly the traffic you had hoped for, and it sure doesn’t seem like the few that do come by are very thirsty.  It’s becoming evident that there are things outside of the “stand” that you should focus on if you want better results.  

For instance, focus on finding the neighborhoods with lots of kids to increase your chances of conversion. How about making it a curbside service so folks don’t have to exit their vehicles?  Be sure to make it clear what the ingredients are so people feel safe and comfortable with the transaction, and ultimately, ensure that it’s a GREAT product so people leave satisfied.            

OK, enough with the analogy, but hopefully you get the point.  A portal is a place to take an online patient payment.  A successful patient-focused billing SOLUTION is much more.  There are some key things to consider with your patient payment experience that many online portals doesn’t solve for:

• How are patients primarily being driven online to pay?  Paper statements? 

• Can patients receive friendly texts and emails with intelligent messaging and automated reminders?  Can the frequency be customized?

• Does login require registering for an account?  How are they accessing their account number?   

• Are patients able to view their statement online, or simply view a balance?  Is the statement just a PDF version of a paper statement, or a dynamic online bill that updates in real time?

• Does the statement match the patient’s EOB, helping them to understand what they owe and why?  

• Can the patient set up an automated, flexible payment plan without having to call the billing office?  Can they set a future date for the plan to begin?  

• Does the patient receive an instant electronic receipt?  What about the ability for the patient to access all of their bills/receipts in one place? 

• How mobile friendly is the experience?  Does it require the patient to download an app?

In our view, it’s all about engaging with patients in the appropriate way, ensuring that the experience is easy (and mobile friendly!) and providing patients with the options that they need to ultimately pay for the great services that you’ve provided.  It may be time to go check out the status of the piggy bank under your lemonade stand, I bet there’s lots of room for more quarters. 

With All the Noise from Healthcare Payment Technology Vendors, How do you Stand Out? Easy...A Better Result!

Everyone is using the same buzzwords, “omni-channel payments”, “seamless integration”, “real-time analytics”, “personalization”, “patient engagement”, etc. Almost every healthcare RCM technology or service vendor will use a variation or combination of these catch phrases. We’ve done it. It’s easy to get caught up in saying what the other guy says. You may even fool yourself into believing that these words are necessary because that’s what your potential partner/buyer will understand. Maybe we’re over-analyzing our own messaging.

Just last week, we had three different prospective partners in two days share their frustration and ask the same question. “Every vendor we talk to says the same thing. It’s really tough to know how you’re all different. What does PatientPay do differently?” It’s a great question that anyone in sales or business development should never forget to address even when you’re not asked. So it got us thinking about what makes us truly unique across the vast landscape of patient engagement and payment solutions. The answer was actually quite simple...our results.

We could expound on the features and functions around engaging patients through omni-channel (oops) communications such as email, print and text. Text is still quite new to the healthcare RCM space. We could tell you this is where we started and we understand that the simple ability to send a text doesn’t get the patient to understand their bill and execute a payment. Or we could talk about the simplicity of the patient experience where you don’t have to download an app or create an account. Or how flexible, interest-free, self-service payment plans are a great tool to help amortize the rising costs of healthcare for patients, even outside of trying times like we’re experiencing today. Payment plans are extremely beneficial and we do them well. But so do others. So from a laundry list of value statements attached to an infinite parade of feature functions, the simple question you should ask yourself is, “So what”? Did the shiny new object and the triple-lindy of personalized segmentation engines give your patient enough clarity and comfort to execute paying their bill? If it didn’t, then you’re failing.

Some level of failure is acceptable. In fact, if you collect above 30% of what you bill patients, you’re absolutely crushing the industry average. So what does it take to get there? You need to know this space very well and have an ability to get abnormally strong payment results even during abnormally challenging times.     

For example, take a specialty provider such as anesthesiology or radiology. Patient balances are typically more challenging to collect since the patient often doesn’t realize a contracted anesthesiologist or radiologist will be sending them a separate bill. If you can increase their collection rate by 20% to 25%, do it consistently, AND do it through a pandemic (when elective procedures have been halted), you’ve brought real value to your RCM partner and their providers. And you’ve brought an increased sense of patient satisfaction by giving those patients (or guarantors) enough clarity and options to hit that “pay” button.

In one scenario, we helped an established anesthesiology RCM partner over the past 12 months increase their collection rate from 8% to 29.7%.  Most impressive is the impact over the past couple of months, where we’ve achieved a 37% increase in their collection rate from February thru April. 

Even new partners can experience an immediate impact. This is critical since a successful result may not solely be in dollars (or percentage) collected, but also in accelerating those dollars for more cash on hand. One hospital-based radiology RCM partner who went “live” in late March saw a 10% collection rate in their first month, and are now looking at a collection rate of 32% (a 220% increase!) through May 20th. Furthermore, the patients represented are in the epicenter of the pandemic in the New York metroplex!

Whether it’s more dollars, faster dollars or a reduced cost to get to both, the one consistent goal is a desire to get results. Unfortunately for providers and their RCM partners, what you don’t see are enough healthcare RCM technologies touting actual results, the one thing that matters most.