During a September 29th webinar hosted by Becker’s Hospital Review and sponsored by ZOLL® Data Systems, Juli Forde, Director of Strategic Partnerships for ZOLL Data Systems, detailed steps providers can take to meet patients’ emerging consumer-driven expectations. Ms. Forde suggested the journey to better patient collections begins by recognizing that the patient financial experience should more closely resemble the clinical care experience.
“Across the country, clinicians seek to obtain a complete [medical] history … before treating the patient,” she said. “Yet, when it comes to billing, [healthcare] treat[s] every encounter the same. We walk the patients claim through an assembly line that ultimately leads to a patient receiving a bill. Often, only when we hear from a patient, which is rare, do we begin to ask about his or her financial situation. But what if we flipped that? What if we completed a financial diagnostic prior to sending the patient a bill?”
Ms. Forde argued that by answering these questions, providers can begin to create a truly patient-centric financial experience that goes beyond price transparency. Here are four steps hospitals and health systems can take to improve patient collections and boost the bottom line:
1. Harness the patient’s unique financial characteristics: A patient’s financial characteristics include demographics, insurance status, insurance eligibility and communication preferences. To optimize collections and the patient financial experience, providers should capture data across each of these categories.
“The more we understand about the patient, the better position we’re in to optimize the experience both for them and for the provider,” Ms. Forde said.
2. Eliminate assembly line claims processing: I it’s not enough to simply capture this data and drop it into a de-personalized claims management process that takes the same approach to collections for all patients. Healthcare today demands a dynamic approach to care and claims processing that treats each patient as an individual from both a clinical and financial standpoint.
3. Integrate an insurance discovery tool: Identifying active insurance for patients early is essential to achieving optimal reimbursement. Providers should select insurance discovery tools that can reveal hidden coverage, eliminate nonapplicable coverage options, allow for secondary and tertiary coverage discovery and identify patients eligible for, but not yet enrolled in, Medicaid.
4. Leverage adaptive financial assistance: If a patient’s financial assistance is insufficient for their needs, they are less likely to pay their medical bills in full. Likewise, if the patient’s payment plan does not match a patient’s financial circumstances, patients are less likely to pay. The solution, argued Ms. Forde, is to tailor financial assistance programs to the patient’s specific needs.
“If the amount of financial assistance is targeted precisely to the patient’s circumstances, they’re more likely to pay in full,” she said.
To learn more about ZOLL Data Systems, click here. To view a recording of the webinar, click here.
