July 12, 2012 •Brian Watson
Online bill presentment and payment software (or EBPP if you’re an acronym aficionado) is a topic that has significant top-of-mind resonance with healthcare revenue cycle professionals these days. And with good reason.
As we’ve written about in the past, EBPP has tipped past the early-adopter-only point and is firmly positioned smack dab at the intersection of thriving with patients and really productive for providers.
According to IDC Financial Insight’s 2012 Consumer Payment Survey, online channels are now the dominant way for consumers to pay bills (with over 50% of respondents using bill payment sites and 73% of all U.S. consumers paying a bill online).
Besides its booming popularity with payers, EBPP offers some seriously bottom-line boosting benefits for billers too. It can virtually eliminate statement processing and delivery time (through online bill presentment). Speed patient payment and posting. And, by creating electronic efficiencies throughout the revenue cycle, help providers stay lean, reduce waste and cut costs.
But how Does Online Patient Payment Boost Service Productivity?
If all that’s not compelling enough by itself, EBPP software also provides myriad ways to streamline, evaluate, and improve patient service practices. Introducing a platform used by both patients and patient service reps (as well as plugged into your legacy system software, payment processing solution, and bank account) helps reduce work duplication and speed the revenue cycle. Not to mention cut overhead. Significantly.
To get there, however, your eStatement solution needs to make customer service a priority. So keep an eye out for these six EBPP best-practice service tools:
1). Online Payment Processing. This is priority number one. The payment process obviously needs to be fast, simple, and flexible for patients. And equally so for service employees. That means having the ability to process front and back office patient payments and administer pre-authorized discounts and payment plans. Seamless integration of payment data with your patient accounting systems is also essential, providing streamlined settlement control and reconciliation.
2). Patient Account Management. Service-oriented EBPP solutions use the web to simplify (and complement) your current patient account management tasks. So any good eStatement approach will make stuff like online enrollment, cost estimation, insurance verification, and insurance/profile updates standard.
3). Online Communication with Patients: Online communication has the benefit of trackability. Conversations are automatically logged and shared with all service employees to provide a rich, actionable profile of a patient’s interactions with your staff.
4). Search Tool: Offline or on-, your patients will inevitably have questions about their statements, payments, or profiles (and maybe all of the above). Giving your reps a simple way to process patient searches by profile, transaction or payment is a great way to resolve issues quickly and painlessly.
5). EBPP Reporting: Web portal monitoring and reporting not only keeps service representatives in the loop by alerting them to all online patient payment and account activity, it also enables easy data updating in your legacy system.
6). Role Administration: Segmenting patient service representatives by access rights and role permissions ensures optimal workstation security, keeps your staff attuned to their specific job requirements, and reduces workload duplication.
In tough times like these, smart patient service tools can have a big impact on your financial performance: streamlining operations, boosting patient satisfaction, and slashing administrative overhead. That’s why, if you’re in the marketplace for an online bill presentment and payment solution, it’s important that you take a peek under the hood and evaluate the application’s customer service tools too. If you’d like to learn more about how EBPP software can help you improve patient satisfaction and reduce costs, schedule a free consultation with the eStatement pros at Elite.
What online patient service tools make the biggest difference for you?