Despite staffing shortages and increasing patient volumes, ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) are still expected to provide high-quality care more affordably than hospitals. Like every healthcare sector, ASCs are seeing an increase in the number of high-deductible and self-pay patients. Add to that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) price transparency rules and federal compliance mandates, and it’s easy to see why ASCs are under tremendous pressure to perform.

Finding Relief with Front-End Charitable Screening

ASCs can effectively mitigate these current challenges by implementing presumptive charitable screening at the front end of the patient encounter.

Engaging patients financially from the outset ensures that accurate, compliant pricing is provided and drives higher reimbursement. ASCs can use automated presumptive charitable screening technology to help them offer hardship or prompt-pay discounts at the beginning of the patient encounter, in a fully compliant manner — with less effort and lower administrative costs compared to manual screening processes.

Strong Business Rationale for Presumptive Charitable Screening

With a shockingly high percentage of out-of-pocket and uninsured patient medical expenses going unpaid, financial screening can transform collection rates. Short-staffed ASCs can take on this additional administrative burden with the help of automated accounts receivable (AR) optimization and patient eligibility tools. Automated screenings and streamlined workflows deliver accurate demographic and eligibility data in near-real time. This puts ASCs in a position to: provide price transparency; identify and enroll patients eligible for retroactive Medicare and/or Medicaid; and presumptively qualify them for available financial assistance — all of which can be accomplished quickly and easily at the beginning of the patient encounter. 

3 Steps To Improve Self-pay Conversion

ASCs that would like to offer compliant, customized financial care to patients need to follow these three steps:

• Step 1: Develop a clear policy that can be consistently applied to all patients.
• Step 2: Take advantage of best-in-class presumptive charitable screening technology.
• Step 3: Develop a compliant, patient-centric package that includes at least one of six foundational elements.

Presumptive charitable screening tools, such as those in the ZOLL AR Boost solution suite, are an important enabler for meeting ASC price transparency and charitable discounting objectives. Treating the patient as an individual, both medically and financially, can have transformational effects.

To learn more about strategies for enabling price transparency and compliant charitable programs,

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