Patient Experience With Healthcare Billing
As we discussed in part one of this series, healthcare billing can often create problems and this can have a negative impact on a patient’s overall experience.
So, every hospital’s overall goal should be to make patient payment easier.
Here are some ideas to help facilitate this:
- Give patients multiple methods of payment (“71% of consumers saying that being offered multiple ways to pay increases their satisfaction” (Fiserv, “Eighth Annual Billing Household Survey, Fiserv Inc., 2016))
- Set up automatic payments and save credit card information for recurring bills.
- Consolidate multiple charges for the same visit into one bill.
- Use electronic/digital communication/billing whenever possible to speed up the process.
- Create online, user-friendly, customizable platforms to view and pay EOBs/bills.
- Offer multiple options to pay bills over extended periods of time.
- Offer discounts for paying early (even at time of service) or paying with cash.
- Educate staff on how to discuss payments with patients.
- Allow/offer the option of patients paying prior to service or while they are still on site.
- Know how much you are spending on debt collection and cut your losses when needed. Only $15.77 of every $100 is recovered once debt goes to collections. (https://nationallist.blog/2016/10/13/medical-debt-collection-difficulties/)
These solutions can help make bills less confusing, relieve patients’ financial burdens, and help hospitals reduce bad debt by seeing more bills paid and by seeing bills get paid sooner.
Improve your organization’s financial performance AND increase patient satisfaction by giving patients transparency and control, while simplifying the payment process. Click To Tweet
