February 26, 2013 •Brian Watson
Patient statement quality affects much more than just collection speed or cash flow levels.
Billing correspondence – good or bad - has a ripple effect on other patient financial service areas.
For example: clean, clear, concise statements reduce patient billing confusion – what’s owed and why. That not only enhances and accelerates revenue collection, it also reduces customer calls into your support center – reducing costs and freeing up your staff to focus on other work.
On the other hand, a poorly design payment stub can make for a messier posting process. It takes longer for your staff to input, there are more exceptions and errors, and you have to wait for funds to reach your bank account and become available for use.
What other patient financial service problems can your bills help resolve?
Let’s take a few common patient service issues and see how smart patient statement tools, techniques and emerging technologies can help lend an efficiency-boosting hand.
The Problem: Efficient Patient Follow-up
Ever wondered what happens to your statement after they’re dropped at the USPS for delivery? How long does delivery take? And – most importantly - is a payment on the way?
Without reliable, up-to-date statement delivery and payment remittance information, many past-due account follow-up activities are at risk for effort-duplication and resource waste.
For example: you place a follow-up phone call to a patient without knowing that they’ve already sent in a payment – squandering employee productivity and potentially angering the patient in the process. The same thing goes for sending unnecessary past-due mailings. Or sending accounts over for third-party collection services.
The Fix: Intelligent Mail Barcode
Intelligent Mail - a new USPS coding system that provides tighter mail piece tracking and reporting – can provide kind of visibility you need to stay on top of statements and payments while they’re still in the mailstream.
By printing unique barcodes on each statement payment stub, it enables near-real-time verification of delivery to patients. So you’ll know exactly where you statement is along the way and when it’s been delivered successfully.
Even better, it provides additional confirmation when patients remit a mail-in payment. Knowing that a check is literally in-the-mail can help you accurately forecast cash payments, better manage workflow within your patient service department and reduce unnecessary follow-up collection activities.
The Problem: Communicating Financial Info with ESL Patients
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly one-out-of-every-five Americans over the age of 5 spoke a language other than English in 2009. Spanish alone is spoken at home by almost 37 million people. And other languages – like Russian and Vietnamese – have also increased considerably over the last few decades.
From a patient financial services perspective, that can cause some serious communication issues. While patients sometime complain about statements looking like they’re written in another language, for ESL patients, that’s often the literal truth.
And that can be a big drag on the efficiency of your patient financial operations. It increases service calls (and costs); slows payment; and can harm patient satisfaction with the treatment process (an especially important consideration in light of the Affordable Care Act’s new quality and patient safety measures).
In addition, many hospitals have found it difficult to staff with the right linguistic skills and cultural knowledge – and are paying a premium for experienced translators.
The Fix: Custom-Translated Statements
Translating your statements and variably personalizing on-bill messaging for ESL patients is an effective, proactive, patient friendly way to prevent language issues from resulting in costly service calls or bad debt.
By identifying patient language needs during registration, your statement processing provider can set programmatical language requirements that automatically translate and variably print ESL-appropriate statements on-the-fly within the same batch as your English-only statements. That includes everything from statement messaging to language-specific customer support and billing channel information.
Another smart idea: provide a Spanish-language customer service phone prompt on all English-only billing to help communicate with patients that might not by immediately identified as ESL accounts.
Customized service prompts provide an understandable cue to follow when nothing else on the statement is recognizable to patients. And it helps them receive language-appropriate attention right-off-the-bat when they call in with questions.
The Problem: Billing Support
It’s pretty much unavoidable: no matter how simple and concise your patient financial correspondence, patients are going to have questions.
But just because it’s inevitable, doesn’t mean it has to be inefficient, too.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder for your staff to provide solid support when they’re handcuffed by a lack of access to patient data.
What data are we talking about? Isn’t all that billing information waiting in your legacy system, at the beck and call of your service representatives?
Well, sure. But it’s not what your patients see. They’re basing their billing questions on the statement they received in the mail. That format provides a very specific visual representation of your billing data. And its appearance shapes the way patients understand what they owe and why.
Communication can be strained if you’re service staff isn’t on the same page (literally) when trying to address patients’ statement questions and concerns. And it can be even trickier if they’ve received several statements with different charge info – say as part of a payment plan or because of a delinquent balance.
The Fix: Online Statement Search
This one’s pretty simple: give your patient financial team access to the same statements your patients have. No transcribing data from a computer screen. No asking patients to describe their statement.
Just a visual representation that they can access and use to quickly and accurately troubleshoot patient statement issues.
Most best-class statement processing companies offer online statement repositories – complete with statement search capabilities – that enable service employees to access a digital copy of a patient’s statement at a moment’s notice. It’s also useful for compliancy-related record-keeping. But that’s just a side benefit. The main event is getting those ultra-expensive patient calls down to a reasonable time period.
The Problem: Payment Processing
Your patient financial services staff already has plenty of responsibilities without all the hassles that go hand-in-hand with payment processing.
Opening mail, manually posting payment, filling out deposit tickets; it’s not the most efficient use of their valuable time.
Not to mention manual processing is slower, more prone to costly posting errors and lacks the remittance correction and fraud-fighting tools that help reduce payment exceptions.
The Fix: Payment Lockbox
Payment lockbox services are an efficient, automated way to quickly monetize remitted payments.
Instead of being received and processed by employees within your organization, payments are mailed to strategically-dispersed remittance centers where they’re received, processed and posted directly to your bank account by an outsource service provider or your banking partner.
That removes your staff from the payment processing business. They can redirect time and focus to other responsibilities. And you get the kind of speed and cost efficiencies that are provided through outsourcing.
Equally important, many best-practice lockbox providers are introducing tools and technologies that help limit payment exceptions. For example, most now use electronic readers to electronically codify payment information collected from payment stubs. And others have introduced electronic capture and conversion of check payments.
Both of these technologies support tighter remittance management. Digitized ACH payments can be automatically checked against historical payment data for verification and updating. And mail-in credit card payments can be similarly compared to a database of lost or stolen cards to protect against fraud.
Bonus Fix: Clean, Clear Payment Stub
Not every organization will have the means to invest in a payment lockbox solution. Sure they’re efficient, but they’re not free. There’s a cost involved, and the healthcare marketplace – and economy in general – are pretty tight right now.
For a low-cost, easy-to-implement fix, we suggest cleaning-up your statement payment stub.
For example, a stub that clearly features key account information – statement date, amount due, patient name and account/guarantor number – makes it a lot easier for your staff to post and process payments. So too will adequately-sized payment forms featuring fields with lots of room to write. (Deciphering handwriting cramped into fields designed to accommodate 8-point type isn’t always easy, after all.)
Those are just a few of the ways that an automated, responsive statement processing platform can help your patient financial services department become leaner and more efficient. Want to learn more? Download our free statement processing whitepaper – The Five Habits of Highly Effective Statement Processing Solutions.
What other statement processing tools do you use to streamline your patient financial services?