The Patient’s Financial Experience: Trends, Innovations, and Challenges

Juli Forde, Director of Strategic Partnerships, AR Optimization at ZOLL^® Data Systems partnered with Jonathan Wiik, Principal, Healthcare Strategy with TransUnion Healthcare to present a Healthcare Business Management Association (HMBA) webinar, “Trends, Innovation, and Challenges: The Patient’s Financial Experience in 2021 and Beyond.”

The webinar (now available on demand) covers insights to help provider organizations get paid in this era of uncertainty. In particular, the presentation uses case studies and current research to help provider organizations:

• Build tangible strategies for obtaining optimal reimbursement.
• Understand why aggressive financial policies and collection tactics are at odds with adapting to the growing patient-as-payer movement.
• Prepare for coming regulatory changes and implement strategies to mitigate negative financial impact.
• Identify and source key patient financial data resources to improve collection efforts and the patient’s financial experience.
• Analyze revenue cycle operations to identify areas of opportunity to positively impact net collections.
  
  
  
  

There are strategies and innovations that help patients more easily navigate the financial responsibilities associated with their healthcare. For example:

Engage patients early in the financial conversation – Empower patients by helping them better understand their care and its costs up front, because a more informed patient feels greater satisfaction and is more likely to pay.

Ensure that earned revenue is captured – Maximize revenue and reduce bad debt by identifying reimbursement opportunities on uncompensated care and underpayments.

Optimize payment strategies – Reduce the cost to collect and improve the patient experience by accurately segmenting patient accounts into optimal payment workflows based on each patient’s unique financial situation.

Three important trends are influencing both reimbursement and patient satisfaction: decreasing access to high quality healthcare insurance, consumerism and the demand for price transparency, and patients' inability to understand healthcare-related bills. Economic trends — including the present, weakened economy — affect everything from employer-provided insurance to how often people seek medical care.

Providers need to get a clear understanding of each patient’s coverage, how much the patient is likely to owe, and then need to put them in the right “payment lane” to maximize reimbursement. The good news is that there are now tools and analytics available to help you get patients into the right payment lane to keep them out of bad debt.

To learn more about how these tools and analytics improve provider reimbursement and the patient financial experience, watch the full 1-hour webinar.

Read More on the Patient Financial Experience 

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