Patients today consult three or more online resources before scheduling an appointment, yet still find it difficult to get to the right provider.
According to RevSpring, nearly 40% report frustration trying to understand what care will cost, and one in four will delay or avoid care entirely because of cost concerns. For health systems, these aren’t just patient experience problems, they’re revenue problems that begin far upstream of the billing department.
During a featured session at Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting in April, Emory Healthcare joined RevSpring, who sponsored the session, to discuss how aligning patient access and financial operations can reduce friction, improve outcomes and protect revenue.
The panelists were:
- Andy Rowles, corporate director of revenue cycle at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta
- Kelsey Ankrom, director of program development, patient access at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta
- Monica Agate, vice president of strategic accounts at RevSpring in Nashville, Tenn.
- Lydon Small, account executive at RevSpring
Below are four takeaways from their conversation.
1. A fragmented journey
The session opened with survey data from 2,000 U.S. adults that illustrated just how much friction patients encounter before they ever receive care: 26% experience frustration scheduling an appointment, affordability concerns cause a significant share to defer or abandon care altogether and nearly every respondent said more could be done to simplify the experience.
Ms. Ankrom described the gap between what patients expect — the immediacy of an online purchase or airline booking — and what healthcare typically delivers. At Emory, the response has been to move traditionally in-house scheduling functions online, simplify the language used in scheduling workflows and reduce the number of questions required to route a patient to the right provider.
“People expect immediacy,” Ms. Ankrom said. “How do we let patients do that in the comfort of their own home, at their own pace?”
2. Scheduling complexity
Mr. Rowles made the case that what happens in scheduling reverberates directly into billing, denials and patient satisfaction, often in ways that are difficult to trace back to their origin.
Emory’s most concrete example involved patients with out-of-network insurance plans being scheduled into clinic appointments, generating tens of millions of dollars in denials.
Addressing the issue required Rowles and Ankrom to work together to embed a real-time insurance flag into the scheduling workflow. When a known out-of-network plan was detected, the system surfaced a scripted alert for schedulers.
Schedulers could then warm-transfer the patient to a financial counselor to discuss options before the appointment was booked.
The result was a 68% reduction in out-of-network scheduling incidents. “It took out the guesswork,” Ankrom said, “and it created an experience that was consistent across all of our divisions.”
3. Affordability is key
The panelists emphasized that the assumption that cost transparency is a billing department concern is accurate. When patients don’t understand what care will cost — or can’t afford it — they don’t show up, they seek care elsewhere or they call the billing department weeks later confused and frustrated.
Mr. Rowles described a specific service line in cardiology where Emory identified that pricing was significantly above market, generating patient complaints and provider pushback. The health system ultimately reduced the rate, prioritizing patient access over short-term margin.
On the payment flexibility side, 65% of Emory patients now pay through a self-service option, 85% of payment plans are set up by patients themselves and 87% of those plans are on autopay. “By offering these flexible payment arrangements and meeting the patient where they are,” Rowles said, “it’s been a win for us.”
4. Operating as one
The through-line of the session was organizational: access and revenue cycle functions that operate in silos create the conditions for exactly the kind of patient confusion and revenue leakage the panelists described.
At Emory, the close working relationship between Ankrom’s scheduling team, which handles roughly 10,000 scheduling calls daily, and Rowles’s revenue cycle operation has been the foundation for every improvement they described. Their out-of-network intervention worked because both teams contributed to the solution and shared accountability for the outcome.
“It might be more work on our side to coordinate,” Ankrom said, “but to the patient, it’s a lot more seamless.”
The panelists closed by framing the patient journey not as a handoff between departments but as a single, continuous experience that demands coordination from the first search to the final payment.
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