| | October 202019UTLOOKHealthcare Tech all major EHR systems to power automation. For patients, the technology delivers a better financial experience by providing more transparency into the upfront costs while making healthcare more affordable. This not only yields more payments for health systems today but also builds patient loyalty for the future.Offering More Payment Options and Flexible Financing PlansFurthermore, Patientco's consolidated billing and healthcare payments solution includes functionality for consumer-friendly digital communications. This includes eBills, SMS, and printed statements. By integrating communication with payment tools, Patientco translates patient engagement to payment dollars. In other words, the platform delivers insights into the communication channel or method that best influences patient payment behavior. Via its analytics platform, Patientco creates new insights to personalize engagement. Patientco's digital-first billing facilitates email and text communication with flexible payment options. Patients are engaged through the digital channels they prefer, and they receive eBills six days faster than they would via mail. The result is better patient financial experience and faster payments for health systems. Another notable aspect of the solution is that Patientco integrates with any health information system (HIS), delivering enterprise-wide connectivity and greater visibility of patient payments while automating manual tasks. "Our software integrates with any system to provide up-to-date patient balances from across all health system care settings while user-friendly terminals quickly process secure credit card payments," informs Joyce. The integration automates posting, reconciliation, and reporting for all payments, regardless of type. In fact, clients that have used the Patientco platform reveal they have experienced a 15-25 percent increase in patient payments.Compassionate Financial CareBasking on the value of its offering, Joyce shares the client success story of Piedmont Healthcare, a multispecialty hospital, non-profit health system headquartered in Atlanta. Piedmont had embarked on an initiative to simplify patient financial care and sought to increase patient collections by 10 million dollars in three years. But this meant the client had to address concerns about their confusing billing statements. Besides, the Piedmont team was not satisfied with the legacy payment tools they were utilizing. In addition to improving the patient experience, they needed to address the needs of its staff. "The client needed a solution that would support both paper and digital financial communications to clearly direct patients to relevant payment options, including affordable, self-service options. They also needed a payments platform with a direct Epic integration. Piedmont found all of that in Patientco," affirmed Joyce.Within the first year, Piedmont collected 4.5 million dollars at the point-of-service. Combined with other efforts, the health system was able to generate more than 7 million dollars in payment lift. Patientco played a key role in supporting this with its patient-friendly communication and payment tools, along with its Epic integrations. Additionally, Patientco helped Piedmont increase digital engagement. By leveraging Patientco's Epic integration, the client was able to reduce the need to manually input credit card and account numbers into multiple systems and increase its point-of-service payments by 30 percent. Patientco's partnership helped Piedmont ultimately reduce patient call handle times, improving the patient financial experience while boosting staff productivity.Paving the way for a Better Patient JourneyNotably, the firm's dedication to assisting its clients in solving problems stems from its knowledge-sharing attitude and people-centric mentality. "Every single person on the team plays an integral part of what we're building every day, with over a million patients already depending on us for a positive payment experience," reveals Joyce. Besides, there are seven core values that Patientco threads into all of its engagements and is instilled in the company's culture: be driven to win, openly trust one another, embrace responsibility, improve each and every day, focus on compliance, make it memorable, and give back. Patientco fosters a working environment where each individual is encouraged to do well through their peers' endless support. "Each core value plays a critical part and ties together in the work we do each day by pushing us to be competent and constantly improve," states Joyce.At present, Patientco is working on delivering a single consolidated experience for its clients. "Today, there exists a huge gap between the expectations that patients and consumers have in terms of what they can see from an affordability standpoint, and technology lags in bridging that gap. We are working to help them navigate this complex landscape in a fair and reasonable manner," adds Joyce. Alongside, Patientco is bringing more transparency into what patients can see by connecting the different touchpoints of the patient journey. For example, if an individual has to pay 800 dollars for a treatment, they should know it beforehand. This will help consumers have a sense of how much they owe and are not surprised later. Over the long term, Patientco also hopes to become a central place for any health system to interact with their patients, for everything clinical and non-clinical. "We want to help people make the best care and financial decisions for themselves by offering all the information they need in a single place and with all the options that the health system can present to them," remarks Joyce. Patients are responsible for a greater portion of their healthcare expenses today compared to ten years ago, but adapting to the "patient as payer" model doesn't mean an organization should rely on aggressive financial policies. The key lies in delivering better patient financial care with improved revenue cycle outcomes. With a partner like Patientco, offering compassionate financial care is easier and simpler than one thinks.HT
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