August 10, 2012 •Brian Watson
The perfect patient statement? I’m just going to come right out and get this out of the way from the start: doesn’t exist. It’s a chimera. A fallacy. An unrealistic goal.
Perfection doesn’t exist in statement design precisely because there’s no objective, quantifiable, one-hundred-percent-agreed-upon standard of flawlessness. A baseball game can be independently, dispassionately perfect: a pitcher faces twenty-seven batters without giving up a hit or a walk. It’s an easy, quantifiable measurement.
Statement design, on the other hand, is a much different situation. We have generally ideas of what is best-practice, or patient friendly, or effective based upon a number of metrics: usability testing with patients or before-after analysis of A/R Days, bad debt, or cash flow on hand.
But there’s no absolute standard in place. And not only is there no established norm, statement processing performance fluctuates (sometime wildly) based upon outside influencers. The same statement delivered to two different bill-paying audiences will almost never achieve the exact same patient satisfaction or revenue cycle improvement results.
Focus on Continuous Statement Improvement
The pursuit of statement design perfection alone isn’t a bad thing. Consistently shooting for excellence is actually a pretty good way to end up with something close. The problem arises when the unrealistic pursuit of perfection causes other valid patient statement tools and design strategies to be rejected, simply because they won’t solve every statement issue.
That kind of zero-sum thinking is called the perfect solutions fallacy. (Although paralysis by analysis is a pretty solid definition too). And it rears its ugly head in patient statement design when incremental improvements are shelved in lieu of a fix-it-all-for-once-and-for-all statement redesign.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with going all-in on a patient friendly statement redesign. Sometimes it’s the only solution that makes sense. But it shouldn’t be the only solution, period.
Small-scale upgrades can be implemented, tested, and make a big difference in the here-and-now. All it takes is a statement processing company that’s flexible and responsive, and a few good design ideas. And that’s why the rest of this post is dedicated to five incremental–but-really-effective statement tools that you should be able to execute without much time or trouble.
1). Improve the Payment Stub. Your stub should be all about ensuring piece delivery and facilitating payment. Anything outside that is inessential. 2D barcodes printed on the stub help with mail processing efficiency, first by enabling cameras mounted on mail inserters to flag statements that are defective, omitted, or out of order; then through detailed mail piece tracking and verification.
To help improve the payment side of the equation, credit card forms should be large enough both to stand out from the rest of the stub (with the help of call-out boxes and shading) and provide room for bulky handwriting. And statement date and account number should be included to help your customer service staff speed payment posting and processing.
2). Add an Account Summary Call-Out Box. Smart patient statements encourage information scanning, a technique where readers search for a key word or phrase instead of reading (or even skimming) a document. Scanning is perfect for patient statements because even with patient-friendly billing practices, modern statement design is still typified by a lot of stuff: insurance information, charge summaries, contact information, payment channels, marketing messages. But most patients are after a few critical bits of information: what’s owed, what’s been paid (either by them or by insurance), and when it’s due.
A simple way to make things easy on patients is by adding a scanning-friendly account summary to your billing. Best-practice account summaries are placed in the most attractive real-estate on the statement (typically above the fold on the first page), and use impactful, colorful call-out boxes, large, bold type, and simple language to quickly convey key billing details.
3). Add an FAQ. No matter how patient friendly your statement, billing questions will happen. But they don’t always have to require a phone call to your customer service team. If you’re like most providers, you know precisely what customer service issues are giving your patients the most trouble. By adding a Frequently Asked Questions to your statement package, you can help solve problems before they become the basis of a time-consuming phone conversation.
4). Translate Your Statements. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Spanish is spoken at home by almost 37 million people over the age of five. And there’s a good chance that at least some are among your patients. Patients receiving statements that are (literally) written in another language is sure to slow the payment processing. Translating your statement and variably personalizing the on-bill messaging for ESL patients is an easy and effective way to fix that problem. It’s also a good idea to provide a Spanish-language customer service phone prompt on all billing for patients that might not by immediately identified as ESL customers.
5). Use Graphics to Add Impact. Graphics are a great way to leverage shared communication conventions to add recognition, emphasis, and knowledge to your statements. Use visual aids (symbols, pictograms, or icons) to call attention to key elements, like customer service contact info and the various payment channel options you provide. To avoid confusion, stick to self-explanatory images that don’t require a lot of previous learning or experience to understand. And to add instant credibility, make your logo visible in the envelop address window to signal to patients that your bill is an important message from a trusted source.
The big takeaway: statement design perfection is absolutely a worthy pursuit; just be sure not to let it get in the way of continuous statement improvement. To learn more smart statement design strategies, download our free whitepaper Building a Better Bill: Why Good Statement Design Matters (And How You Can Get It).
What other “small scale” statement processing improvements have you had success with?