Managing patient interactions and engagement, such as fielding billing questions and contacting patient about and balances, is time-consuming and costly. The ROI for that manual work is low and, more problematically, eats into higher revenue-producing tasks like managing payer reimbursements.
Rising labor costs, heavy workloads, and increasingly complex claims management processes drive revenue cycle management companies (RCM) to automate patient interactions in order to increase efficiency. Automate patient interactions to free up staff time to focus on more complex issues involving greater financial exposure. Here are three ways to accomplish this.
Proactive Personalized Outreach to Automate Patient Financial Engagement
Revenue cycle management companies (RCM) spend hours every month contacting people who have an outstanding balance to no avail. Paper bills and collection calls simply do not work and risk creating the type of negative experiences that generate terrible reviews for your customer practices. Digitally native companies, led by the likes of Amazon, have established high consumer expectations for the type of digital experiences people desire. These companies communicate with consumers based on their individual needs and circumstances and their success can be attributed to their understanding of how to personalize these digital journeys. Innovative revenue cycle management companies (RCM) can now leverage similar data-driven digital communication strategies to personalize their automated patient interactions. Personalized digital outreach can improve patient payments and decrease costs associated with patient collections by delivering the right message, at the right time. Revenue cycle management companies (RCM) can increase their patient collection rate to 95% while decreasing the hours of effort and cost to collect by 10X.
Reduce Incoming Billing Inquiries and Questions
According to a survey conducted by MedData, 88% of patients demand more straightforward healthcare bills. Their survey finds that medical bills often go unpaid due to confusing statements that lack transparency around charges and services. 67% of patients do not know how much they owe versus how much their insurers owe, and 65% of patients would leave a provider for a better payment experience. All of this confusion makes patient collections much more difficult and leads to hours of uncompensated effort from revenue cycle management companies (RCM) who have to answer calls related to billing. These problems can be solved through payment solutions that offer data transparency, that automate patient communication, and that answer questions related to insurance payments, payment history, and cryptic medical procedure descriptions. Revenue cycle management companies (RCM) who proactively address these challenges with technology can reduce calls related to billing issues by as much as 92%. In addition, patients who have access to detailed information about their financial responsibilities are 56% more likely to pay their medical bills on time.
Automated Payment Plans to Reduce Labor Costs and Increase Cashflow
Many patients cannot afford their healthcare bills and need to pay for high out-of-pocket expenses incrementally with partial payments or payment plans. Unfortunately, it can take hours of effort to identify those individuals as well as to create alternative payment arrangements for them. By automatically identifying the people in need of payment plans and proactively signing them up for an arrangement that suits their financial circumstances, you can eliminate hours of extra effort and lower the cost to collect. Having intelligent automated solutions that can offer the right payment plan, at the right time, to the right people helps prevent revenue loss and reduces the number of accounts that would otherwise be referred to a collection agency.
