Patient financial experience is a crucial part of any health system.
However, siloed financial processes, such as separate systems for price estimates and processing payments, can hinder patients' experience, according to Chris Jayne, Vice President of Customer Success at Patientco, an Atlanta-based payment technology company.
As he put it: Patients "don't care how many tools you have together. They just want to have one cohesive place" for payments.
During a Sept. 8 webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by Patientco, Mr. Jayne joined Andrea Mejia, Executive Director of Patient Financial Care at Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare; Mike Simms, Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Greensboro, N.C.-based Cone Health; and John Saffioti, director of operations consulting at Woodbury, N.J.-based Inspira Health Network, to discuss the link between integrations and the patient financial experience.
Here is how patient payment integrations with Patientco helped Piedmont Healthcare, Cone Health and Inspira Health Network maximize technology investments and improve the patient financial experience.
Piedmont Healthcare. Piedmont Healthcare, an 11-hospital health system, has used Patientco since 2018. Ms. Mejia said Piedmont wanted a payment partner that would be integrated in the health system's Epic EHR system so employees don't have to navigate through multiple systems for payment processing. From a consumer standpoint, Piedmont also wanted to provide a better financial experience for patients. "We had an online portal, but it wasn't friendly for patients. We didn't see a high adoption rate," explained Ms. Mejia. But now more patients are engaging electronically. For example, 49 percent of Piedmont patient bills are presented to the patient digitally. Ms. Mejia said Piedmont has also reduced time spent on processing payments and opened opportunities for teams to spend time on other areas of process improvement.
Cone Health. Cone Health, a six-hospital health system, has been a Patientco client since 2014. Before Patientco, Cone Health was looking to integrate payments into Epic and wanted a user-friendly patient statement. The health system also wanted a better patient portal for payments. Mr. Simms said patients can now go to the health system's portal and send a message to customer service staff, without patients having to use the phone. "It's all about patient experience and patient engagement/satisfaction, just like the airlines," he said. Cone Health has seen an increase in patient payment collections year over year as well as a two-times increase in monthly cost savings since introducing digital-first billing.
Inspira Health Network. Inspira Health Network, a three-hospital system, uses Cerner and became a Patientco client in 2018. Mr. Saffioti said of the decision to use Patientco: "Our patient payment form online wasn't clear as far as how we confirmed payment, how we collected information. It was very challenging … We also wanted to position ourselves for price transparency." To improve its patient payment process, he said Inspira focused on making it easy for patients to understand their bill and how to pay it as well as giving them different avenues to pay and setting up self-payment plans. The health system's hospitals moved onto the Patientco platform first followed by physician offices and urgent care centers. Ninety percent of Inspira patient payments are now self-service.
To view the webinar, click here. To learn more about Patientco, click here.
More articles on healthcare finance:
Cook County Health seeks $23M funding boost to help reverse some cuts
TeamHealth downgraded to 'CCC+' due to UnitedHealth contract dispute, low ED volumes
Outlook remains negative for US for-profit hospitals, Moody's says