August 2, 2012 •Brian Watson
Best-practice statement processing solutions should be all about helping healthcare providers grow and accelerate revenue collection.
To get there, clean, clear, patient friendly statement design generally meets smart, efficient print and mail tools that help ensure that the entire self-pay billing and payment process is fast, error-free and stubbornly receivables-driven.
And that’s, obviously, really important. Better cash-flow. Less bad debt. Fewer uncollectable accounts. That kind of stuff tends to make a pretty big difference on the financial health of your bottom line.
Uncovering Efficiency Boosters
But best-practice is pretty rarified air, after all. Top-of-the-food-chain statement processing solutions really need to nail the patient accounts optimization side of the equation, too. Because, as you know all too well, patient billing and payment doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s tied to all sorts of internal patient accounting practices that increase the workload of your staff and tie up key resources, from front-line customer service issues to back-end payment processing.
That’s why, if you’re looking for truly excellent statement printing and mailing services, it pays give careful consideration to how your statement processing company deals with the service-side of the patient billing and payment equation.
Although there are all sorts of ways that statement processing companies pitch in to improve patient accounting (everything from simple on-statement improvements through sophisticated tools like Internet Voice Recognition), here are four service-oriented, value-added tools that represent a pretty solid baseline:
1). Custom Reporting. Sophisticated accounting and legacy software applications provide a valuable resource in helping care providers administer revenue cycle activities. That’s what they’re made to do, after all. But that’s also not to say they don’t have data integration shortcomings that make it especially challenging to pull off certain tasks: say bringing together specific kinds of intelligence for drill-down analysis of key revenue cycle info, or creating custom workflow reports for customer service.
That’s where best-class patient statement solutions can help. Patient statement programs are custom developed to plug directly into your legacy accounting system. And that high degree of customization enables it to slice and dice key information from your data file and cobble it together into insight-rich reports that provide an easy-to-understand-and-use tool revenue cycle tool. Some examples of the productivity-boosting custom reporting that statement processing providers offer, include:
- Claim file reports for identifying outpatient/uninsured claims.
- Encounter reports that identify who qualifies for final notice mailings.
- Aging bucket reports that classify accounts into days outstanding categories.
- Specialized work lists for use by customer service representatives.
- Follow-up/encounter sheets for managing customer service workflow.
- Suppressed statement reports that detail why statements were flagged for suppression.
- Minimum balance and credit balance suppression reports.
- Anomaly reports that flag customer records that don’t correspond with pre-defined customer billing logic.
- Customer move reports that describe which customers have changed mailing addresses since a statement was last sent.
2). Patient Statement Storage and Retrieval. Ensuring that your staff is on the same page (or same statement, in this case) as your patients is a simple, effective way to boost service productivity and performance. Electronic patient retrieval builds on prior patient statement storage methods (like CD archiving) by giving service employees the tools to perform real-time, web-enabled statement look-up and retrieval of the exact bills that patients have questions about. Giving service employees the ability to view the same bill as patients helps them resolve issues quickly and painlessly. And that reduces service call time, improves departmental efficiency, and speeds revenue collection.
3). Patient Payment Lock-Box Services. Your staff has way more important stuff to do than sorting and opening return mail, manually posting payments, and making trip after trip to the bank. Lock-box services are provided by many best-class statement processing companies for just that reason. Automation is the key: digital capture and online storage of remittance data helps you quickly parse and review patient payment information and reduce manual data-entry error. So you get the benefit of faster, more efficient payment posting that saves your patient accounting department loads of time and money. Most importantly, by reducing the amount of your outstanding float money, you’ll have more cash flow on hand for organizational activities. And that’s always a good thing.
4). Point of Service Payment Collection. With most healthcare providers experiencing a rise in their ratio of self-pay patients (a 2009 HFMA Financial Pulse study pegged the number of hospitals that experienced an increase in self-pay receivables versus the previous year at 97%), point of service collection is only growing in importance. And statement processing companies have responded with web-based cashiering systems that enable credit, debit, check and even cash payments to be accepted on-site. Similar to EBPP (and often bundled along with eStatement solutions), point of service collection focuses on automation of key payment tasks, providing easy depositing of settlement funds and an online transaction record for payment tracking and management.
Although a good overview, those four strategies are really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Best-practice statement processing goes way beyond ink-on-paper printing and mailing. Ready to discover even more value-added strategies and tools? You can start by downloading our free whitepaper, The Five Habits of Highly Effective Statement Processing Solutions.
Beyond the strategies mentioned in this post, what value-added patient statement strategies have helped you step up patient accounting efficiency?