As patient financial responsibility continues to rise, revenue teams are looking for ways to bring deeper intelligence and personalization into financial workflows across the full patient journey.
Costs keep rising faster than wages, and patients expect a retail-like experience with clear communication, flexible payment options, and no surprises. Health systems are finding that financial performance is determined before care is delivered, not after billing. The real opportunity is to engage patients early, with information and options that make sense for them.
Most patients want to pay, but they often don’t know what they owe until after they’ve left. When patients understand their financial responsibility before they arrive, they are more likely to pay, and staff spend less time chasing balances after the visit. According to the Healthcare Financial Management Association, providers collect up to 90% of patient payments when the financial conversation happens before or at the time of service. After the patient leaves, that rate often falls below 50%.
Using pre-service engagement effectively looks like providing accurate cost estimates, offering payment plan options before the visit, and proactively screening for financial assistance eligibility. Surfacing those insights within existing workflows allows staff to act on them without changing how they already work.
Patient communication preferences vary significantly by age, demographics, and past behavior. Some patients respond immediately to a text, others with a phone call, while many still rely on a printed statement. One of the most common missed opportunities in the revenue cycle is treating financial outreach as a one-size-fits-all approach.
Smarter outreach uses channel scoring and behavioral and financial data to route each patient to the right communication method at the right moment. When digital and print are used together, response rates can be roughly twice as high as using either channel alone. Coordinating those channels around a single, consistent patient experience is what drives faster resolution and stronger collections.
Even patients who intend to pay face obstacles when the process is cumbersome. Tokenization replaces payment credentials with secure tokens that enable AutoPay and payment plan debits without patients re-entering card details. Payment transactions can be reflected in connected financial and clinical systems in real time, allowing patients to complete transactions through familiar digital channels. The result is less abandonment and more collected revenue without adding friction for staff or patients.
OhioHealth operates 12 hospitals and more than 200 ambulatory facilities. Like many large health systems, they were spending heavily on paper statements and struggling to move patients toward digital billing. By implementing smarter patient engagement strategies, they converted 65% of patients to digital billing, reduced costs by $300,000, and increased self-pay collections by more than $5 million.
See how OhioHealth and other health systems are getting similar results.
Watch the on-demand webinar to explore the strategies driving higher collections and a better patient financial experience.