Can improving patient experience help reduce bad debt?

A comprehensive way to improve patient collections and reduce bad-debt-HFMA Webinar

Socurce: https://www.cbsnews.com

Bad debts can be represented as patients not able to (or not willing) to pay their portion of the bill. According to one report by Transunion Healthcare, uncompensated out-of-pocket care rates have increased by 11% in 2017 as compared to same quarter of 2016. Due to various reasons patients are not able to pay this and that results in bad-debt. The magnitude of bad-debts is huge and it keeps on increasing. According to one report, 68% of patients failed to fully pay off medical bill balances in 2016, up from 53 percent in 2015, and 49 percent in 2014. This number is expected to climb to 95% by 2020.

Summary: The webinar I studied on Healthcare Finance Management Association describes in depth about how to reduce bad debt and increase collection from patients by providing them customized services and best experience.

Ms. Donna Reddy at Change Healthcare believes that improving patient experiences can help reduce bad debts and increase collections for services provided. The most important area to improve patient liability lies within increasing price transparency and patient estimates. Patient payments are affected by not just increased health bills but also the how well they receive services regarding scheduling, management of claims and care coordination during their period of treatment with the hospital.

Common reasons behind disassociated patients are:

• Poor communication with the patients

• Lack of coordination between front end and back end processes

• Vendor disputes

• Poor implementation of financial educations training across staff and vendors

• Failure to identify coverage in timely manner

• Staff shortage required for patient care.

Application: In order to improve these aspects with an aim to provide better patient experience, she advocates using Integrated Self-Pay Management System. This system of patient service aims at providing best possible and customized patient experience with continuous support from hospital staff. A multi-channel patient outreach approach not just helps to locate patients at each and every point but also helps to improve patient experience which ultimately enables us to get their responses and hence collections. Say for example, a tech-savvy person can be reached by electronic mails and/or be updated on applications while on the other end those patients who prefer person-to-person contact should be connected via telephone or face-to-face. In order to ensure that staff is capable of locating their patients at each point of revenue cycle they should be provided time to time training and education which will help optimize the process. Key characteristics to implement this model are:

• Enabling coordination among front-end and back-end teams

• Increase patient engagement by encouraging patient interactions at various levels of revenue cycle

• Utilize resources and tools for process improvement

• Customized patient experience management and patient segmentation based on their financial needs.

Locating the patients at all levels of process and personalizing their demands by sharing their information at a common platform and taking care of what their demands are will definitely improve patient satisfaction ratios which lead to better returns of bills. Say for instance if patient wants to schedule a follow-up appointment, it will be nice if attendant already know who their physician is and let them know what is the earliest that they can receive an appointment. Also if some patients needs help in filing claims, trained officers can be provided by the hospitals which will minimize denial rates and thus increased returns. Hospitals should attempt to help patients based on their needs (financial, economical, social and co-insurance) and try to engage their patients in making them aware of insurance and its benefits that they can receive which will ultimately help in completion of payment process and claim filing so that they can at least receive co-insured sum along with sum from the patients.