Overcoming Payment Challenges and Building Patient Trust

Patients don’t always trust their medical provider or insurance company to provide accurate bills. Patient mistrust and confusing bills can lead to delayed or skipped payments and larger customer service issues. And, a less-than ideal financial interaction may even propel patients to change providers or forgo healthcare services.

The key to overcoming patient payment challenges is scrutinizing your patient financial experience and tailoring it to meet each patient unique needs and financial situation. If your patients are struggling to understand their bill or make a payment, pinpoint key touchpoints, and use digital communication to bridge communication gaps. Pre-service engagement, for example, is a great opportunity to prepare patients of their financial obligation and even set up a payment plan. A consumer-centric payment platform like the all new PersonaPay must be easy to use (no passwords or usernames) and provides payment options that they are most apt to use to fulfill their financial obligation.

Helping patients anticipate, plan, and pay for medical expenses will ultimately help build their trust and loyalty. Here are some other techniques that providers can use to improve the patient experience:

Prepare patients with an understanding of their service cost and combine it with the right messaging and flexible payment options for patients to engage financially before their clinical encounter.
Use payment analytics, such as Vu Predict, to pinpoint the best payment option for a patient. Exciting advancements to this solution tailors patient payment conversations and presents a payment option that is suited to the patient to inspire action.
Transform billing statements into a “one bed, one bill” concept that allows a patient to review and pay multiple obligations due for a hospital procedure within a single bill.
Close the digital gap in healthcare financial communications and deliver digital communications that patients want with an OmniChannel engagement platform, such as the recently announced eVoke Automate. Electronic billing communications can increase payments by 50% of payments with patient satisfaction ratings averaging 93%.
Make it easy for patients to pay their bills. Deliver a personalized payment experience and let them make payments without waiting for a statement using autopay or payment plans and text-to-pay options.

Steve Callis, RevSpring’s president of payments, recently spoke with PaymentsSource to discuss the patient payment experience and how to overcome these payment barriers. Read about it here.