Steps to Improve Patient Communication for Increased Collections

 

Building a strong relationship with patients is vital for healthcare providers to get timely medical billing and collection. Communication is the key to creating this patient-provider trust and association. Healthcare costs reached $4.1 trillion in 2020 and are still rising exponentially. With the increase in this cost, there has been a significant upsurge in patient payments as co-pays, deductibles, and outstanding amount increases. 

 

Proper patient communication helps healthcare practices to provide quality care and services. It also helps to increase engagement resulting in faster patient payment collection. As the patients pay more for their coverage, they demand quality care for the high cost they are paying. So, healthcare practices must create a proper communication channel and methods for the patients to improve patient balance collections. 

 

Here are the steps to improve patient communication for increased collections. 

 

Know Your Patients

Every patient is distinct so is their excuse to delay or deny payments. Healthcare practices should be aware of their patients and analyze their behavior to understand their nature and the probability of paying on time. Knowing your patients also helps to personalize the communication, which could increase patient engagement resulting in faster patient balance collections.

 

Train Your Staff

Proper communication is an excellent way to set patient expectations and increase collections. Healthcare practices should train their staff on communicating about outstanding balances, estimates, and co-pays, while patients are in the office or when they are away. It is also essential to appropriately engage your patients once they leave the office to boost patient balance collections.

 

Use Patient Portal

The patient portal is the service that has shown signification results in terms of patient payment collections. The patient portal gives access to medical records, allows quick appointment booking, and secured bill payment options. These portals can be accessed from anywhere as they use a secured cloud to store information and provide services.

 

Use Technology

Healthcare providers need to use technology to communicate with patients. They should use IVR and text messages to remind the patients about essential appointments and payments instead of spending time and money on FTEs. They should provide e-statements instead of paper-based statements to reduce medical billing and collections turnaround time. 

 

Multiple Channels to Pay

Patients can give excuses to deny the payments if they see a single mode of payment. Providing multiple payment channels and flexibility can increase the chances of faster payments. Healthcare providers should provide facilities like card-on-file to patients so that they can save their card details, pay according to their convenience in installment, and schedule the payments so that they never miss an important payment date.

 

Communication is the key to prompter patient payment collection. Healthcare providers will get on-time payments if they can properly engage and satisfy their patients.

 

AnodynePay is one of the US's leading patient billing and payment providers. It delivers simple payment solutions that healthcare practices can use to collect faster patient payments. The patient portal, patient pay services, e-statements, and patient reminders are some of the services AnodynePay offers its clients. To know more about the RCM services, you can visit www.anodynesimplepay.com.