The patient financial experience has never been more important. Learn why your organization needs a comprehensive, automated approach to empower staff and patients.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- 50% of patients are frustrated by the healthcare payment process, and over 60% would consider switching providers for a better experience.
- Providers can improve the patient financial experience by using a complete platform, offering clear communication, and leveraging purpose-built automation.
- Positive patient experiences build loyalty. Loyal patients can contribute up to $1.4M in value over their lifetime to a health system.
- Waystar's smart platform simplifies healthcare payments for providers and patients so they can focus on what matters most: caring for their patients and communities.
When it comes to the patient financial experience, healthcare is playing catch up. Consumers have long expected a consumer-first approach in other industries. Now they want the same from healthcare – and many feel they’re not getting it.
Studies show that half of patients are frustrated with their provider’s billing and collections processes. What’s more: 63% say they would consider switching providers for a better patient financial experience.
That puts providers in a tough spot. Not only do they need to provide a consumer-friendly experience in a complex industry not built for patients to bear this level of financial responsibility, but they must play catch up to other consumer health companies, alternative care options and big-box companies to keep patients happy.
The stakes for creating a frictionless patient financial experience have never been higher. Every organization needs to have a comprehensive approach that meets today’s high patient expectations.
In this article, we’ll walk through the critical elements to improving the patient financial experience and how providers are applying these strategies to achieve success.
Critical components to improving the patient financial experience
First, providers must put the right foundation in place for sharing information – not only with patients, but also between their team members. Providers need a complete, efficient platform that’s user-friendly for patients and for the staff patients interact with. Most providers don’t have that. Their technology is structured for departmental or functional efficiency rather than for the patient experience – something that depends on connected processes and ease of navigation. Having that foundation is critical to putting the right data in the right hands at the right time.
Secondly, once providers have the right platform, they need to empower their staff to provide clear communications pre-service and throughout the patient journey using these tools. When your staff has a system that prevents unnecessary delays related to insurance verification, or one that accurately estimates what patients will owe and why, they now have the power to create a better patient financial experience. Put yourself in a patient’s shoes – we are all patients, after all – and think about what you need as a consumer. You want convenience and flexibility; you want to engage how and when you choose; and you want the same kind of transparency and control you have everywhere else in your increasingly digital life. The right system will allow your staff to give all of this to your patients.
Third, providers must leverage automation where appropriate. Given the challenges most organizations are having in hiring and retaining their workforce, purpose-built automation is crucial. Not only does it free up staff to focus on meaningful patient interactions rather than tedious manual tasks like prior authorizations, but it also leverages technology to improve the accuracy and efficiency of these processes.
Not all automation is created equal: purpose-built automation is critical to a successful strategy
Automation won’t be as effective if it doesn’t fit within your workflow and learn as it goes to provide ongoing intelligence. Purpose-built automation, on the other hand, goes beyond alleviating staff burdens to drive and shape workflow.
For example, general automation can help your staff move data or complete high-volume, low-value tasks. Purpose-built automation, however, takes it one step further, helping your staff with high-value, nuanced efforts such as:
- Confirming eligibility in real time to prevent downstream denials
- Securing prior authorizations without chasing down the information or disrupting the patient’s access to care
- Generating and delivering accurate patient estimates that empowers staff and patients curating the right kinds of messages based on patient preferences so they know what they owe, why they owe it and how best to pay
This type of automation can have a profound effect on the patient financial experience as a whole. When processes work faster and more accurately, patients are happier, and happier patients yield more payments. In fact, studies show that nearly 75% of satisfied patients pay in full, while only 25% of unsatisfied patients do.
The patient financial experience is impacted by foundational tasks that occur long before they receive a bill
The reality is that things like eligibility checks and authorizations are critical components to your patient engagement strategy. If they aren’t completed quickly and correctly, you run the risk of frustrating the patient, delaying care, or creating a negative patient financial experience.
Again, look at it from the patient's perspective. If your eligibility isn’t correct upfront, or if the appropriate authorization isn't secured, that can lead to delayed care, denied claims, or even patients being inappropriately billed directly. All of those contribute to a negative patient financial experience, which decreases loyalty – and loyalty matters.
Experts estimate that a patient can provide upwards of $1.4M in value over their lifetime to a health system. That means building loyalty is critical, not only to the patient experience, but also to an organization’s long-term financial health.
Increase loyalty with better processes throughout the full patient financial journey
The organizations that stand out to patients are the ones with better accuracy and effective upfront processes – both of which depend on how things work behind the scenes. In order to build loyalty, providers need great financial clearance and great engagement strategies.
While creating a better financial experience is complex, providers can start by ensuring:
- Automation is purpose-built so it shapes workflow and learns as it goes.
- Eligibility solutions gather and surface data in the most useful way for staff.
- The patient engagement strategy considers patient preferences, propensity to pay, and patient-centric payment options.
Meet patient and staff expectations by refocusing teams on higher-impact activities, while leaving the tedious work to automation
Many providers are struggling to find staff. The hard truth is that most won’t be able to hire their way out of this crisis any time soon. So, the best way forward is to innovate – to find better ways to do things, not more people to do them.
Take pre-service estimates. With purpose-built automation, analytics and artificial intelligence, organizations can accurately determine how much a patient will owe in addition to the best time and method to deliver these estimates to patients. They can deliver them via the patient’s preferred communication method, which saves resources. And they can let staff know which patients have a high propensity to pay and engage so they are able to prioritize the most impactful patients and accounts. This drives more payments, saves massive amounts of staff time, and frees them up to focus on more complex tasks. Most importantly, it leads to a better patient financial experience by getting patients the information they need, how and when they need it.
Again, the critical difference here is that the automation is purpose-built, not off-the-shelf. Intelligence and personalization are key when you’re looking to reduce friction and build trust with patients while easing the demands on staff.
How providers successfully utilize these strategies to improve the patient financial experience
Over our multi-year partnership, UCHealth has used Waystar’s automation to improve their prior authorizations process. The result: They’ve increased their authorizations days-out working window from 2.5 days to 9 days. This ensures patient access well in advance of appointments, which reduces rescheduling or delayed care. And it ensures that the patient’s experience starts off right.
Another health system in Southern California has seen phenomenal results by pairing a thoughtful patient engagement strategy with Waystar solutions. By customizing payment options and prioritizing outreach based on propensity to pay, they only follow up on bills that are likely to be paid. The result: they increased payment collections by more than 50% and improved patient satisfaction scores without adding any staff to their small team.
A major health system in Texas is another great example of an organization where proactive patient engagement works in tandem with automation. “Waystar helps them automate the creation and delivery of pre-service estimates – with 70%+ of their estimates requiring no manual effort. Moreover, patients can access that information – right alongside all their other information – directly within their health system’s mobile app. The result: Because the information is delivered automatically, in their own app, patients get better estimates seamlessly, without staff doing extra work.
Learn more about how your organization can reduce manual effort while improving the patient financial experience.
Your organization doesn’t have to give up its processes or approach to leverage purpose-built automation. The right solution should fit in seamlessly with you, your staff, and your patients.
For more information on how to empower patients and providers with a transparent and accurate financial experience, view this recent on-demand webinar.
Waystar delivers cloud-based technology that simplifies and unifies the healthcare revenue cycle—and brings more transparency to the patient experience.