How Technology can Help you Optimize your Patient Payment Process

The healthcare industry is evolving and should adopt technology tools to enhance processes and increase patient payments. The trends in healthcare payments show that there is more financial burden on patients due to higher deductibles, coinsurance amounts, and copayments. 

According to the Statista Research Department, in 2020, the total U.S. out-of-pocket healthcare payments reached approximately 388.6 billion dollars. Health insurance out-of-pocket maximums have been increasing each year. The payment collection should evolve with the increased burden on patients to contribute to their medical bills. 

Due to that, practices must be more proactive regarding technology in their patient payment collection process to keep their revenue flowing. This proactivity approach should include maximizing your technology efforts in the patient payment process to collect every dollar your practice has earned, maximize cash flow, optimize your workflows, and deliver outstanding patient experience. 

Here are some ways you can optimize your patient payment process with technology:  

1. Integrate billing and patient payments 

Simplify patient payments by integrating these two processes. These can help track your collection efforts and make your payment process smoother. Also, make sure you deliver clear and concise patient statements to facilitate the payment process for patients. 

2. Transition to digital statements 

Patients prefer digital statements, especially text over email, since it is easy to click and pay immediately. There are complications with staying with paper statements, such as wrong addresses and snail mail that patients do not read. It is also time-consuming and costly for your practice to send out, print and mail these statements.  

3. Offer digital payment options 

According to the 2020 InstaMed Trends in Healthcare Payments Annual Report, 85% of consumers prefer an electronic payment method for medical bills. Also, make sure you have a patient payment portal in place. Patients want visibility into their payment process and to take ownership of their healthcare bills. 

4. Shorten your revenue cycle 

Going digital shortens the Revenue Cycle. Automating the claims status process is a massive win for your practice’s revenue cycle. Technology can help you with eligibility verifications, prior authorizations, missing information identification and analysis, and denials management.  

Optimizing your backend processes can also help you speed up your revenue cycle process. These can give you more time to fix potential errors and optimize patient satisfaction.  

5. Automate your patient billing process 

Patient billing automation intelligently delivers text, email, and mailed statements to customers, saving valuable time, and getting you paid faster. This process can also help your practice simplify patient collections driving online payments, halting communication when payment is made, checking delivery status, tracking generated revenue, and more.  

Learn how to incorporate technology into patient payment collections to increase revenue and optimize cash flow. Contact an AdvantEdge expert, or stay up to date on company and industry trends by visiting our Linkedin page.