Ochsner Health System in Louisiana has made physician outreach and education part of its work on price transparency and providing pre-service estimates to patients.
When patients talk to their physicians about treatment options during a visit, they often ask the question that all consumers want to know when considering a big purchase: How much will it cost?
That's why Ochsner Health System in Louisiana has made physician outreach and education part of its work on price transparency and how it provides pre-service estimates to patients.
Katherine Cardwell, vice president of revenue cycle at Ochsner, described this work during the HealthLeaders Revenue Cycle Ideas Exchange in mid-March.
In addition to proactively providing estimates for all scheduled services and providing an online self-service price estimate tool, Ochsner went live with a Central Pricing Office (CPO) in 2018, a call center which consists of a team of internal consultants that handle all the pricing questions for the system.
Physicians aren't the only people who get asked cost questions. Leaders and employees systemwide get often get questions, too, so anyone who has a pricing question—whether it's a clinical or non-clinical employee, or a price-shopping patient—gets routed through the CPO.
"A lot of physicians and [clinical] operators were saying that patients kept asking them [price] questions," Cardwell says. "They didn't feel like they had a great way to answer the patients at that point, so we really wanted to provide a resource for them to send their patients to get that information."
Cardwell says one challenge they had with the CPO is "making sure that everyone knew it existed." The revenue cycle wanted all Ochsner's patients, physicians, and employees to know that they had this available as a resource.
To get the word out, they did what "seemed like a 24/7 road show."
"When we went live with this system, we went to every physician meeting we could go to. We went to every operations meeting we could go to," Cardwell says.
The revenue cycle also has little cards that they give to physicians, so when a patient asks about a price for a procedure, the physician can write down the CPT code and the patient can refer to it when they call the CPO. The cards also include the CPO phone number.
In addition, the revenue also wrote an article about the CPO for the system's internal communications email newsletter, "Ochsner This Week." The email goes out to the entire system weekly, and their article included information about the CPO and linked to the system's patient financial resources page.
That communications work has paid off. Cardwell says when they went live in 2018, they had about 2,300 questions come into the CPO. In 2020 they had almost 18,000.
"We've done a good job getting that word out there," she said.
The HealthLeaders Exchange is an executive community for sharing ideas, solutions, and insights. Please join the community at our LinkedIn page.
To inquire about attending a HealthLeaders Exchange event, email us at exchange@healthleadersmedia.com or learn more here.
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
