August 25, 2012 •Brian Watson
HIPAA patient privacy laws present healthcare providers with a difficult set of regulatory challenges.
There’s the detailed audit trail you need to have to prove compliancy beyond a shadow of a doubt. Looming HITECH rules set to increase scrutiny of financial services providers and their PHI-related activities. Not to mention target dates, interim rules, interim final rules, and swirling deadlines. It all gets a little bit complicated. And stressful.
That’s where EBPP can once again play an important role. As we’ve written about in the past, eStatement solutions are about much more than just online statement access and balance payment. They also automate and add efficiency. Eliminate common print and mail costs. Streamline patient service practices. And have the data protection bona fides to help you enhance the security of your revenue cycle practices.
Read on for five ways eStatement solutions help keep your PHI safe and sound, patient payments fraud-free, and billing operations trackable and compliant:
1). Eliminates Print and Mail Security Concerns. One of the key advantages of EBPP is that it avoids the mailstream entirely. Statement delivery (i.e. upload) and online payment is instantaneous. And that provides a host of really impressive results, from reducing postage overhead to accelerating patient statement access and balance payment.
But it also offers the additional benefit of eliminating the kind of print and mail snafus that toe the HIPAA-incident line. Because even for statement processing companies with best-practice address cleansing and defect management, statement printing and mailing defects will happen. That includes everything from commonplace errors like sending a bill to the wrong address, to more serious problems like insertion errors or printing issues.
By automating statement presentment and payment - and moving the entire process to a secure online environment - EBPP helps contain statement defects and information leaks.
• Statements are produced electronically and automatically uploaded, effectively removing print and mail human/machine errors from the equation.
• Traditional paper statements contain an actual statement loaded with sensitive financial and PHI information. EBPP email notifications, on the other hand, are just that: notifications. All essential information is stored in a safe, password-protected online platform.
• Notification triggers that alert your patient financial staff when an email bounces back or an account hasn’t been verified following registration can be used to immediately ensure email delivery.
2). Provides a Detailed Audit Trail. To stay fully HIPAA and HITECH compliant, a detailed audit trail of how PHI is used during patient financial activities is a must-have. Fortunately, that’s another area of expertise for eStatement solutions.
Online patient payment software provides a trackable trail of all electronic revenue cycle activities that’s ideal for compliance purposes. With EBPP, you know exactly when a statement is created and uploaded. When an email notice is sent to the patient (and whether it arrives successfully). And when he or she logs on to their EBPP portal, views a bill, makes a payment, or completes any other action on the website. It’s all tracked and compiled online for future review by you or your staff.
3). Uses a Secure Online Environment. The USPS delivered nearly 170 billion mail pieces in 2011. The vast majority of which were delivered without incident. But identity theft is a booming criminal activity. And with its rise has come a corresponding increase in mail theft of financial documents.
eStatement solutions enable all patient financial activities to take place within a safe, secure online platform that tracks and stores all patient activity from registration onward. Payments are collected, posted, and processed using PCI-compliant practices. And all profile updates and patient communication with your service staff are completed and documented in a secure arena (rather than using potentially un-secure channels like unencrypted email).
4). Protects Against Payment Fraud. Credit card fraud is a serious concern for businesses of all shapes and sizes. A 2008 Mercatur Advisory Group report pegged the cost of credit fraud at 7 cents per 100 dollars worth of transactions. Or, when translated, billions of dollars in lost revenue each year.
Online billing and payment solutions reduce credit card payment fraud by stopping deceptive payments before they’re processed. Credit card payment information is checked against a database of lost or stolen cards to protect against fraudulent payments. So you’ll know - in a matter of seconds - that a credit card payment is truly on the up-and-up.
5). Validates ACH Payment Transactions. eStatement applications are not just an essential tool for collecting, processing, and posting online patient payments. Best-in-class solutions also provide a necessary failsafe to prevent transaction errors. How? By validating and approving ACH and electronic check payments, for one.
Patients’ routing and account numbers are checked for issues and automatically repaired - if necessary. Then, the EBPP software runs that data against internal negative and hot lists to confirm that an account is both in good standing and has the ability to complete the transaction.
Need help turning the ideas presented above into cold, hard patient financial policy? We’d love to lend a hand. If you have online billing security or compliance questions, please contact us today.
What patient financial steps are you taking to ensure compliancy with the HITECH’s upcoming changes to the HIPAA Privacy Rule?