October 5, 2012 •Brian Watson
Running a successful healthcare business is hard work. Putting patients’ needs first while also ensuring that the balance sheet is appropriately healthy is no easy task. Which means that from the business office to patient care (and everything in between), challenges abound.
Take the revenue cycle. It brings in the cash that runs your business. So, naturally, it’s pretty darn important.
But it’s also a major headache. And seemingly getting more complex by the minute.
Let’s count the ways. Insurance claims processing is a complex, time-consuming task. You do business with multiple payers, each one with its own distinct contract and payment rules and regulations. And coding and claims processing is already difficult enough before even considering the employee productivity it’ll take to meet looming ICD-10 guidelines (especially by the October 1, 2014 deadline).
In short: keeping things as simple as possible is vital. First for your bottom line. Then for your sanity.
The Make/Buy Conundrum for Medical Practices
Finding, training, and retaining a solid, experienced business office staff can be a good way to alleviate some of the pressures. Legacy software helps make the entire process more manageable. And departmental outsourcing is an attractive optimization option for larger practices or clinics.
But one of the easiest ways to keep your business office sharply focused on revenue collection is by eliminating tasks outside of your employees’ collective comfort zone.
Your staff is equipped to handle patient access. They do claims and remittance management day in, day out. They know patients and how to deal with their billing and payment questions. All those tasks are a valuable use of their skills, experience, and time.
Statement processing? Not so much. Printing statements, stuffing and sealing envelopes, and buying and applying postage is a drain on the productivity of your staff. And statements produced on your office printer often lack the best-practice communication tools – like branding, personalization, and patient friendly design – that boost bill comprehension, patient satisfaction, and collection speed.
What other advantages does outsourcing your patient statement processing provide? And why might it make a ton of sense for the financial health of your practice?
1). Cost Advantages. Spend less, get more. That’s a pretty compelling reason to outsource, right? And - considering statement processing companies’ bulk purchasing power and experience curves - it’s also pretty intuitive.
That’s because statement printing and mailing is all they do. Which means not only are they way more experienced (and efficient) in print and mail ops than your back-office staff, but delivering millions of statements also provides impressive purchasing power. They buy materials in large, low-cost volumes. And take full advantage of bulk and pre-sort postal rates. So you get:
• More efficient statement processing, printing, and insertion.
• Postage discounts only available to mass mailers.
• The ability to re-focus employee productivity on other mission-critical billing and practice management tasks.
2). Streamlined Service. There’s explicit statement printing costs: the materials, labor, and postage it takes to actually deliver a bill. And then there are hidden costs: additional expenses that go hand-in-hand with generic, bare-bones statements.
One of those areas affected by sub-par statements is patient support. Bills that aren’t patient friendly (that is clean, clear, concise and easy-to-understand-and-use) increase billing issues and support requests. Outsource statement processing companies obsess over design. White space, color, graphics, type size, copy: all these aspects are critical to ensure patients grasp key billing elements – what’s owed, for what, by when – at a moment’s notice. They not only speed revenue collection (more on that in a minute), but also streamline patient service, providing:
• Fewer calls to your patient service center
• Lower patient support overhead.
• Less time spent by business office employees reacting to patient billing issues.
• Patients that are more satisfied with the billing process.
3). Lower Days in A/R. As alluded to in point #2, good design works wonders in ensuring patients understand their statement and financial obligation. And that helps you collect faster. The reasoning is simple: if patients understand exactly what they owe (and why), they won’t need to call your office for an explanation. That’s good. It means accelerated receivables, lower days in A/R, and more cash for your bottom line.
Outsource statement processing also speeds collections because it’s, well, just plain faster. Automation means statements are printed, stuffed, and mailed in a fraction of the time it takes your staff (often as little as one-business day after file receipt). Postal bundling and pre-sorting accelerates statement delivery. And pre-mailing address cleansing technology reduces the potential for undeliverable statement bounce-backs. Outsourcing enables:
• Faster job preparation and delivery.
• Less time in the USPS mailstream.
• Less return mail (and handling/re-mailing costs).
• Faster revenue collection.
4). Better Branding. If you’re like most practices, you work hard on your brand: who you are, what you do, why it matters. That includes everything from the way your front-line staff interacts with patients to the marketing channels you use to bring new clients in the door (and keep them coming back again and again).
Generic, confusing, unbranded statements can be a drag on your brand and send the wrong message to patients. Statement processing companies use the full toolset at their disposal – smart design, full color statements, variable printing techniques – to produce statements that work really well and uphold your hard-won brand equity. Best-class statements:
• Enhance brand identity by emphasizing your logo, color scheme, and branded elements.
• Use variable printing to enable personalized, brand-building messaging and marketing appeals.
• Are simple and intuitive, leaving patients with a positive impression of their entire treatment experience – from registration through billing.
Outsourcing patient statements is a great way to take extra work off of your patient service staff’s plate. Not to mention it’s also infused with efficiency: cutting costs, streamlining service, accelerating revenue, and protecting the brand you’ve worked so hard to create. To learn more about the benefits, download our free whitepaper The Five Habits of Highly Effective Statement Processing Solutions.
Do you outsource patient billing activities? Why or why not?