Editor’s Note: This article originially appeared on VisitPay’s website.
Revenue Cycle as Brand Ambassador
On Monday, VisitPay participated in the HIMSS Revenue Cycle Summit. It was a great day of conversation and discussion with some of the leading health systems in the country. As always it was fun learning about what others are doing and thinking in the fast-changing space of patient financing.
What was clear is that everyone agrees that the role of the revenue cycle function has shifted to where it makes a real difference to the overall patient experience. The last thing patients need is to be stressed about understanding a bill. But more than that, there was interesting discussion on how revenue cycle can actually become a brand ambassador for the provider and a torchbearer for the consumer experience.
Coupled with this need and shift, however, was a recognition that the function, like so many others, must do more with less. How to deliver care and financial solutions at lower cost with a better experience was an often discussed dilemma. Followed quickly by discussion on how technology can help support those two objectives that, on the surface, seem to pull in different directions.
The Importance of Individualized Strategies
As a marketer it was great to see a number of presentations open with discussion of the patient, and what patients look like in the specific geography of the health system that was leading the discussion. It’s not just that health systems are dealing with digital natives, but that a digital native in Salt Lake City is different from a digital native in San Diego. It’s not enough just to bring technology to the forefront of the revenue cycle experience. It has to be done in a way that reflects the culture and demographics of the local population.
With revenue cycle being the first and lasting consumer impression of a health system, this personalization of the encounter has never been more important. And this belief is, of course, right in alignment with the way we think at VisitPay. We start our implementations with localized scoring and segmentation models that we believe portray patient payment dynamics in local markets with unparalleled accuracy.
It is this understanding that leads to revenue cycle execution and experiences at the individual consumer level. A patient payment portal is the delivery mechanism for a tailored consumer finance strategy for each patient. The patient payment portal is not an end in its own right, but a means to an end.
Experience Coordinator
We also learned about new roles within the revenue cycle function. The “experience coordinator.” Someone to focus on content, messaging and consumer experience, responsible for end-to-end process optimization and personalization. And as Gerilynn Sevenikar, VP of Revenue Cycle, Sharp Healthcare, nicely said, learning how to “lead with kindness.”
It was great to see so many revenue cycle leaders imagining what the world would look like if we could personalize the experience for patients and their individual encounters.
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