Implementing new health payment systems in hospitals and healthcare organizations may be the answer to bottom-line woes. Hospitals and healthcare organizations are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve the bottom line. Critical factors for success include positive provider performance and feedback, as well as improved patient financial experience and engagement. 

Positive Provider Performance and Feedback 

Research on the well-established relationship between healthcare provider experience and patient outcomes suggests that: 

• Burnout is associated with an increased risk of compromised patient safety and lower quality of care.                                           
• Dissatisfied physicians are more likely to misprescribe, leading to expensive complications in the long run. 
• Nurse dissatisfaction can lead to compromised patient safety and missed opportunities for quality care. 

Research also shows that the financial experience has as much impact on patients’ attitudes and opinions as the clinical experience. The billing portion of the healthcare process can be stressful for some patients, but it is an unavoidable part of the overall patient experience. It is also often the last chance to ensure patients are satisfied with their quality of care. Further, customers’ willingness to pay for a product increases by 14.4 percent based on their experience. This is just one reason to ensure your healthcare staff is satisfied with their workload and resources–so they can happily provide quality care.

Providing healthcare workers with quality tools and resources is essential to generating high-quality outcomes. Automated billing software within the revenue cycle can speed up tedious tasks and reduce human error. It is crucial to implement changes that can help staff excel at their jobs by improving efficiency, effectiveness, and stress levels. 

Utilizing Effective Technology  

Providers can help ensure positive results by employing effective technology. The best health payment systems are ones that can be customized and tailored to an organization’s needs. This important factor will optimize workflows and enhance the patient payment process. Real-time reconciliation with your billing system is also an important factor in enhancing staff efficiency. Automated posting and balance updates should be readily available within the system—saving an organization time and resources.

By using the right patient or general ledger payment solution, healthcare providers can also gain better insight to mitigate hidden risks and address payment issues before they grow. A good payment solution should offer a provider full control of a patient payment and will allow them to track a payment, record patient satisfaction, automatically post and reconcile to the proper accounts receivable or general ledger system, integrate with any EHR/EMR systems that currently exist, and seamlessly offer patients affordability options like loans, payment plans, financial counseling, and discounts.

Another benefit of choosing good health payment systems is enhanced security and compliance. Maintaining and procuring devices, such as integrated P2PE credit card devices, is very important. Every payment transaction should be safe and secure. It’s imperative that compliance rules and regulations are prioritized, no matter where payments are taken. With the increase in the number of work-from-home employees, workspaces should be secure and compliant to ensure best practices. To prepare for any shift in work environments, consider opting for health payment systems that offer the following safety measures: 

• Company-approved devices and equipment with protection measures in places such as antivirus or malware 
• Secure connection to your network, and/or applications such as VPN or multi-factor authentication 
• Home environments with a private office space and/or headsets to ensure privacy for sensitive conversations

The right health payment systems can equip providers with the best tools to improve performance, patient engagement, and the bottom line. 

Positive Patient Experience Leads to Financial Engagement 

The payment solution an organization employs will have a direct effect on patient experience. The best health payment systems should enhance patient experience and engagement—making it easier to pay and improving an organization’s bottom line.

Healthcare organizations can achieve these goals and others by employing digital-first strategies: secure text-to-collect, patient portal adoption, and phone support are all examples of effective ways to collect payments. By offering an easy-to-use, digital payment system, you can drive financial engagement and optimize revenue cycle management. Patient financial engagement is a critical part of the overall patient experience, and it’s crucial to offer technology that will engage patients from the first visit to secure payment. 

Requesting payment before care or at the time of care is the best way to collect a balance. Implementing digital-first payment strategies stimulates cash flow and promotes effective patient-provider communication—the key to avoiding misunderstandings about what patients owe. 

Healthcare organizations can also encourage patient portal adoption to drive financial engagement by fostering good patient self-pay practices. By providing patients with a self-service portal, they can: 

• View consolidated bills in one view. 
• Make secure payments on patient or guarantor balances as early as pre-service. 
• Choose from a variety of preferred payment methods. 
• Update contact information. 
• Access their account 24/7.

Offering touch-free payment options will allow you to engage with patients at any point in their care journey. Offering a touchless way to pay with an estimation tool enables patients to see their estimates in real-time and pay directly from the patient portal.

Phone support is also an important service to offer patients. Providing interactive voice response (IVR) to patients is an easy way for patients to access and pay their medical bills, 24/7. Offering IVR also reduces the volume of calls to your healthcare organization, freeing up valuable time and resources.

Communicating with patients about their financial responsibility before their visit is crucial to ensuring satisfied patients and payment. Effective communication gives patients a greater feeling of trust and the ability to budget for their care. 

Implementing convenient health payment technologies will improve the bottom line through various channels. Timely payments, reduced administrative costs, and more efficient use of resources are possible with the right payment system.

Patient Independence and Peace of Mind

Patient independence is vital to patient engagement and the overall patient experience. As expected, patients more involved in their healthcare journey are more likely to be connected with their financial obligations. Patients who feel they have access to and control over their medical bills are also more likely to give higher patient satisfaction scores.

An easy-to-understand, patient-focused financial experience allows patients to avoid the stress of receiving bills by mail weeks after their treatment. Patients aware of their financial obligations before treatment are typically more comfortable with meeting those obligations—leading to higher revenue and cash flow for your organization.

Catering to patient needs and utilizing automation improves the healthcare experience, leading to patients who are engaged in their medical journeys. 

Patient engagement depends heavily on increased ownership and involvement in how people pay their bills. The myriad and symbiotic benefits of proper patient engagement cannot be overemphasized. Offering patients a self-pay experience with all the information and tools they need to make a payment encourages financial peace of mind for them and improves operational efficiency for your organization.

A Payment System Solution: HealthPay24 

HealthPay24’s patient payment solution offers a comprehensive system that automates workflows and processes and simplifies medical bills into one workflow. This makes payments more convenient for the patient and provider. By logging into the payment portal, patients can:

• Make quick online payments on new and prior balances.
• Establish payment plans.
• Enroll in electronic notifications.
• Take advantage of discounts offered by your healthcare organization.

Differentiators for Providers

HealthPay24 allows you to take control of your organization’s revenue cycle—improving workflows, behaviors, and patient engagement outcomes. Integrating the simple and secure payment system alongside your existing registration and billing system allows you to improve your bottom line through positive loyalty scores and patient engagement.

The easy-to-use technology is designed for results. The customizable dashboard allows you to configure rule and role-based permissions based on your organization’s requirements, optimizing workflows, and improving the patient payment process. Real-time interaction with your registration system means our system can facilitate a patient automation outcome simultaneously with patient check-in. Automated posting and balance updates are at your fingertips, improving transparency between the patient and your organization.

HealthPay24 offers insight and visibility so your organization can evaluate performance, monitor patient satisfaction, and manage your revenue at a granular level with the right health payment system. 

HealthPay24 arms providers with the highest standard of security and compliance, taking a hands-on approach to working with your organization to maintain devices. With integrated P2PE credit card devices, every transaction is safe and secure.

Differentiators for Patients 

HealthPay24 offers patients a better way to pay, enhancing the patient experience as well as your healthcare organization’s bottom line. 

Healthcare organizations use the patient engagement framework to structure models of care centered around the most important factor, the patient. Through this framework, healthcare organizations can have more meaningful engagement and a better quality of care. The patient engagement framework improves patient self-efficacy and reduces confusion surrounding healthcare services and patient payments.

When it comes to the patient financial experience, a responsive technological interface helps successfully guide people through a potentially stressful process. HealthPay24 simplifies the patient financial experience through unified payment processes, streamlined reconciliation, and seamless integration with any existing EMR. 

Using our technology, patients can access their total financial responsibility in one convenient location. Our system allows patients to view estimates and make payments from the patient portal. By accepting many avenues of payment, including text, app, phone, online, or cash, patients can feel secure in choosing the best option for their unique situation.

HealthPay24 offers providers various ways to get patient revenue in the door faster.

HealthPay24 Customer Satisfaction 

HealthPay24 was built on teamwork, growth, and innovation. Trust is at the forefront of our people-over-business model, allowing us to build strong relationships with our clients. Working together to increase patient engagement and improve an organization’s bottom line is our main priority.

HealthPay24’s client success stories speak for themselves. Deaconess Health System, a healthcare provider to thirty-five counties in Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, is a prime example of how a major healthcare organization can improve its bottom line by implementing HealthPay24’s efficient and intuitive health payment system.

 “The benefit of using HealthPay24 in addition to Epic MyChart is that HealthPay24 has a simple online payment center, a good user interface, and we can process our non-operational transactions,” 

—Autumn Link, Director of Finance at Deaconess.

HealthPay24 was named in Black Book’s Top 10 Patient Payment Technology & Software List for 2021. Black Book bases its rankings on various performance indicators, such as client experience scores, opinions of healthcare professionals, and clinicians from several types of healthcare organizations. HealthPay24 is also KLAS Rated and Reviewed.

HealthPay24 is an EngageSmart Solution. EngageSmart is a leading provider of vertically tailored customer engagement software with integrated payment capabilities. EngageSmart’s scalable solutions offer unparalleled adoption and retention rates, and user-friendly interfaces. In 2020, an estimated 26 million consumers interacted with an EngageSmart solution.

A Patient Engagement Solution for Your Organization 

HealthPay24 has been a leader in the healthcare sector for over twenty years. Our business is built on trust, dedication, and some good old-fashioned teamwork. Optimize your organization’s patient self-pay revenue by implementing HealthPay24’s innovative and comprehensive payment solutions. Visit https://www.healthpay24.com to learn more, or request a demo to join the growing number of providers using the HealthPay24 patient engagement solution.