September 7, 2012 •Brian Watson
Does the thought of early September involuntarily get you thinking of touchdowns and tailgating? Extra points and points allowed? Well, you may just be a football fanatic (like me).
And, little secret: it’s not just us. For millions and millions of Americans this weekend - and the return of the NFL - might as well be a national holiday.
But this is a business communication blog. For business communication topics. Not a deep-dive on football news and strategy. So what can football strategy teach you about statement processing?
Quite a bit, actually. Like patient statement processing, football requires plenty of strategy and planning. Not to mention sharp execution and attention to detail.
So read on for 5 lessons from the gridiron that can help improve your patient billing practices.
1). The Lesson: Master the Xs and Os.
Football is as much about strategy, planning, and preparation as it is brute strength or world-class athletic ability. Smart schemes and plays help put players in the right place to succeed.
The statement printing and mailing equivalent? Clean, concise, easy-to-understand patient statement design. Well-organized billing is beneficial on many levels: it reduces your patient service burden, helps enhance and accelerate balance payment, and ensures that patient goodwill built up throughout the treatment process isn’t lost at the last minute by statements that are confusing or inaccurate.
Master the Xs and Os of smart statement design by leveraging smart, proven strategies like:
• Use a clean layout. The average patient statement features loads of data. Slim things down by only including information that helps patients understand your statement and act on its cues. Then keep the design clean by breaking down information into small, clearly marked chunks of information with white space, color, and call-out boxes and graphics.
• Emphasize What’s Important. Critical account information – what the patient owes, what they’ve already paid, what their insurance has paid (or will be paying shortly), and when it’s due – should be absolutely clear to patients. That means prominently placed above the fold and emphasized with color, bold text, and attention-grabbing design elements.
• Stress Support. Billing issues are inevitable. So provide contact information more than once on the first page of the statement and on every page thereafter.
• And Payment. Use graphics with clear-meaning to denote your payment channels. And ensure that patients have no doubt as to how to pay with simple summary instructions.
• Write Simply. All patient statement messaging should be conversational, using an active voice, possessive pronouns, and common language free from billing buzzwords or industry jargon.
2). The Lesson: Speed Rules.
In today’s NFL, speed is essential.
Big, tough linemen may still the rock on which winning football teams are built. But speed is the difference between good and great. It helps offensive and defensive schemes run more efficiently. Leads to game-changing plays. And covers for all sorts of mental mistakes and breakdowns.
Speed is no less important for best-practice patient billing. Self-pay receivables are a key part of the revenue cycle that helps power your organization. You rely on that cash to reward employees, pay vendors, and reinvest in infrastructure. And any delay in collecting limits organizational flexibility and your ability to use your hard-earned revenue as needed.
That’s why fast statement processing, printing, and mailing matters. Take a page from the NFL and focus on speed with the following statement processing best-practices.
• Postal presorting. Mail bundling and presorting classifies mail by ZIP code before a project is delivered to the USPS. Presorting reduces a step in the mailing process, accelerating statement delivery to patients and reducing postage costs.
• Variable Printing. Speed and flexibility go hand-in-hand. Variable patient statement imaging underscores that truism. Having the ability to seamlessly print data on the fly eliminates both the need for additional time-consuming steps in the production process and supplementary mailings.
• One-Business Day Project Turnaround. Each day a file sits in the queue waiting to be processed is another day added onto your Days in A/R. Best-class statement processing companies recognize the need for speed, guaranteeing one-business day production to ensure fast statement processing.
3). The Lesson: Keep Innovating.
Football is a copycat sport.
From the spread offense to “Tampa-Two” zone defenses, teams latch on to (and leverage) the success of their competition with remarkable quickness. The most successful teams stay one step ahead of the opposition by constantly innovating: in strategy, nutrition, training, and practice techniques. Or virtually anywhere there’s a competitive advantage to be had.
Follow their lead. Patient billing isn’t a cutthroat, zero-sum game that requires you to stay one step ahead of the competition. But maintaining optimal cash flow does take a spirit of innovation. Some new practices to put in your billing playbook include:
• EBPP: Online billing and payment is a great way to use the efficiency of the web to your advantage. It speeds statement access, accelerates and increases patient collections, automates common patient accounts tasks, and reduces statement print and mail overhead.
• IVR Billing: Interactive Voice Response programs enable patients to make payments via the phone through the use of voice or input keypad tones. IVR helps automate phone collection and optimize the productivity of your service staff.
• Point of Service Collection: With self-pay collections near an all-time high, point of service payment is an increasingly valuable patient billing tool. Today’s applications use the web to help manage, automate, and integrate common payment collection and processing tasks.
4). The Lesson: Practice Makes Perfect.
The best football teams make complicated stuff like blitz pickup and receiver hot routes look simple. That’s because they work at it. Constantly.
In the patient statement space, this means constantly testing billing documents to make sure they connect with patients. And analysis doesn’t have to be exhaustive. A simple focus group or usability study will often provide loads of improvement data.
Make sure your patient statements pass muster with assessment tools like these.
• Usability Testing: Ask your patients to interact with your financial correspondence. Then ask them questions about their experience. Usability expert Jakob Nielson found that small tests with 5 users find nearly 85% of the issues with a design. Which makes small-scale focus groups and usability tests an ideal way to inexpensively uncover what patients like – and more importantly don’t like – about your statements.
• Statement Review: Patient feedback on your statement is really important. But so is making sure that it all works properly. It sounds like a no-brainer, but double-checking all phone numbers, physical addresses, and website information can help prevent some really big issues later on. And test all on-statement elements, like variable payment channel information or your OCR lockbox scan line, to make sure it’s all working perfectly.
5). The Lesson: Turnovers Are Costly.
Fumbles and interceptions are often the difference in a football game. They’re a lost opportunity to put more points on the scoreboard. But more than that, they often result in a team pinned back in their own territory, having to defend a short field after a major momentum change.
Return mail can be equally problematic to your patient billing and payment program. Processing return mail and updating patient address information adds delays and expense to patient billing operations. As does statement re-mailing. Fortunately address information can be pre-scrubbed without a great deal of cost or hassle. We suggest using:
• NCOA Address Cleansing. USPS NCOALink technology helps prevent bad mail before it happens. Address data is vetted using NCOALink to correct and update patient address information prior to a statement entering the mailstream.
• Correct Address Mistakes. CASS address verification is a service offered by the USPS to improve the quality and accuracy of address, zip code, and coded delivery information. When used along with Address Element Correction (AEC), another USPS value-add that transforms problem data into correct, CASS-standardized addresses, address verification helps reduce bad mail bounce backs and ensure your statements are eligible for automated mail discounts.
Want to learn more about how best-practice statement processing can benefit your organization? We invite you to download our free whitepaper, Building a Better Bill: Why Good Statement Design Matters (And How You Can Get It).