Why Make the Switch?
When it comes to choosing patient payment vendors in healthcare revenue cycle management, there are a lot of options out there for hospital administrators. But with so many choices, how can you be sure you’re picking the right one for your facility?
The answer lies in understanding the patient’s financial experience. A good patient payment provider offers a seamless, convenient way for patients to pay their bills—online, over the phone, or in person. They should also have a robust suite of tools to help you manage and understand your data. With so much at stake, picking a provider that can give your patients the best possible experience is essential.
There are many risks and rewards to switching your patient payment vendor:
- You may want to switch systems because your current workflow is outdated or lacks functionality.
- Switching could lead to an improved bottom line, patient engagement, staff efficiency, and accuracy in reporting. However, a replacement requires significant investment of time and money.
- There is a risk that the new system may not live up to the promises made by the company.
- There can be problems integrating between different systems within the healthcare organization.
- Support for the new system might be inefficient or lacking.
There are many different patient payment providers, and choosing the right one for your business can be challenging. But with these lists below, you’ll have all of your bases covered: essential research points to ask when looking into a potential provider, best features, and information on how seamless integration benefits patients and healthcare professionals alike.
Before Reaching Out, Do Your Research.
When evaluating patient payment vendors, one of the critical factors to consider is their ability to integrate with your back-end systems. Seamless integration is vital to providing a positive patient financial experience.
Unfortunately, many providers either can’t integrate, or the integration is difficult to use. This can lead to frustrated staff and patients and lost revenue. Make sure to ask potential providers about their ability to integrate with your back-end systems before you make a decision. Otherwise, you may find yourself regretting it down the road.
Key considerations:
- Review performance ratings and reviews on KLAS to gain better insight into patient satisfaction.
- What does their current customer base look like? Do they have experience with organizations like yours?
- Do they have the resources to handle the task?
- What are their key differentiators? Are they partnered with major industry players, and will the partnership suit your needs?
- Do they have case studies to back up success stories?
- Ask for data, success stories, and examples of successful integrations.
- Speak with someone familiar with the provider to verify they’re competent.
The significant shift from paper-based documentation and billing to electronic healthcare records (EHRs) has enabled providers to manage their finances more efficiently and improved the overall patient financial experience.
However, this transition has also created some new challenges. In particular, healthcare providers need to integrate their EHRs with their financial software to manage their finances effectively.
Fortunately, patient payment providers can help with these tasks. You can save time and money by working with a provider that can integrate your existing EHR, financial software, project management process, estimation tools, devices, and processors. Not only will you be able to streamline your operations, but you will be able to provide your patients with a better financial experience.
Questions to Ask Your Potential New Payment Provider
Depending on the size and complexity of the organization, it can take anywhere from three months to a year to fully implement and integrate a new system.
Is there a dedicated team for integration?
To ensure successful integration, it is important to have a dedicated implementation team in place responsible for managing the project from start to finish. This team should clearly understand the organization’s goals and objectives, as well as the technical capabilities of the new system.
You’ll want to consider how many available resources they have. A patient payment provider with available, dedicated resources can offer a higher level of service and support. This will enable a better patient experience by providing more support and services. When choosing, consider how many dedicated resources they have so you can get the best possible service.
These resources will also need to work closely with the various stakeholders throughout the organization to ensure that all data is transferred correctly and that everyone is prepared for the change. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to integration, following these tips can help ensure a smooth and successful transition.
The Right Patient Platform.
Remember, the right patient payment platform will manage the following core components effectively:
Patient engagement: The healthcare payment process must engage patients in their care to ensure that they understand their financial responsibility and make informed decisions about their care.
Reporting and analytics: The healthcare payment process must be able to provide accurate and actionable reports and insights that can help healthcare organizations improve their overall financial performance.
Communication: The healthcare payment process must effectively communicate with patients, providers, payers, and other stakeholders to coordinate care and drive successful outcomes.
By effectively managing these core components, a good patient payment provider can help healthcare organizations improve their overall financial performance.
In conclusion, whether patients prefer to pay their bills online, over the phone, or in person, a good patient payment provider makes it easy for them to do so. Additionally, they should be able to integrate with your back-end systems. A smooth financial experience for patients requires seamless integration. As part of the integration process, they should also have a dedicated implementation team in place that will take care of the project from beginning to end.
HealthPay24, Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management Provider.
At HealthPay24, we have a proven track record of successfully implementing and servicing large, complex healthcare providers. We have a 99.99% on-time implementation rate, and our go-live/implementation success rate is among the highest in the industry.
We are also well-known for our ability to integrate with multiple systems and platforms.
Example: Northwell Health had 11 different billing and registration systems within a single system. We successfully integrated all of those systems into our platform without disrupting their operations.
We are also EMR agnostic and estimation tool agnostic, which means we can work with any system or platform. And because we are processor and device agnostic, you can use your current processor/bank. As a healthcare organization with over twenty years of industry experience, we understand the importance of patient peace of mind. It is more likely that patients will pay their medical bills, enroll in payment plans, return for follow-up appointments, and make payments on time when they have peace of mind.
Payments to the provider can be secured early in the care journey by offering affordability options and allowing the patient to make a payment off the estimate with direct posting to the provider’s accounts receivable—and we are not tied to using any specific vendor’s processor or devices.
So if you’re looking for a healthcare revenue cycle management solution that can provide a seamless patient financial experience, HealthPay24 is the right choice. Please visit us at https://www.healthpay24.com/.