There has been a steady rise in the HealthCare revenues from the patient’s portion, over the past 7 years. With increasing copays and the rise of high-deductible plans, healthcare consumers have more out-of-pocket costs than ever before. The large and small medical groups continue to struggle with collecting money from the patient they’ve owed. For most medical groups the pressure is to strike a balance between resolving patient balance and maintaining patient satisfaction to retain the patient. The smartest way to manage patient payments is to collect more, faster, and at less cost with a better patient experience.
The Problem: Delayed or lost payments because of paper statements cycles.
Medical Groups have been alarmed about their current practice of sending the patient statement. The following points are to be brought to their awareness immediately.
- As per industry standard, the statement cycle is for 30 days, i.e. if we do not collect money at the time of service, we have to wait for 30 days for the statement cycle.
- The patient statement is mailed to the patient’s address. There could be instances when they are not at home, or it gets missed out owing to the many emails received at the same time. This way they overlook these bills.
- Patients are willing to pay the bills; however, due to lack of time and busy schedules, the bills remain unpaid.
- If the patient statement does not reach the correct person at the correct time, it really takes months for getting the bills paid.
- This results in increased administrative costs and huge patient A/R.
The Solution: Patients getting bills electronically with ‘Pay Now’ option:
The medical group has now realized that paperless billing and collection makes a lot of sense in today’s pressure-filled healthcare business environment. Whereas at iPatientCare, they can have the paperless patient collection solution in the form of claims and remittance using the integrated services – Patient pay, which allows medical groups to send an electronic statements with one click.
- The statement can be sent as soon as the claims are processed by the payer, without waiting for the next statement cycle.
- Patients get these statements in their email with ‘Pay Now’ option, and they have the liberty to pay it from their computers or phones.
- The patient can simply click on “Pay Now” on their statement and pay their bill when it is convenient for them.
- All the payments made by patients would directly come to the practice in the form of remittance.
Collect more patient payments with iPatientCare & Patient Pay:
- A collection success rate that’s 3.5 times better than the industry standard.
- The only statement that aligns charges with a patient’s EOB.
- Payment is less than 14 days, on average.
- Savings of $4.00 per statement.
About the Author
Vipul, as Sr. Technology Officer at iPatientCare, has been driving constant innovations, research, and development, and rethinking of application architecture to meet challenges faced by physicians’ offices and hospitals/health systems. With more than a decade of experience, Vipul has been one of the most versatile brains behind iPatientCare product suite. Conceiving an integrated Practice Management application module has been Vipul’s significant contribution to iPatientCare.
