Top Tips on How Automation Can Drive Your Patient Collections Up

With most industries, the consumer landscape has changed. Digital communication and payment methods have become part of everyday life for consumers. However, not in healthcare, which continues to lag. Because patient financial responsibility now accounts for approximately 30% of practice revenue, if you are not adopting a digital payment strategy leveraging automation, you are leaving money on the table.

Here are our top tips to close the gap:

1. Go Digital

Most patients would like to communicate and make payments either online or through a mobile device. Most practices, however, are still communicating and offering payment solutions the old-fashioned way - over the phone or by expecting patients to mail a check. This manual process is not only cumbersome, but it moves payments along at a snail’s pace.

In contrast, 95% of text messages are opened within the first few minutes of being received. Combine this with Apple Pay and Google Pay and online payments, and you’ve just leveled up. By reducing the friction and time it takes for a patient to make a payment, you will see your patient collections skyrocket.
 

2. Automate the Process

Going digital is a big improvement but moving to an automated payment process is a game-changer. Studies show that increasing the number of touchpoints early in the payment cycle drastically increases the likelihood of completed payments. Taking a digital-first approach shortens the revenue cycle, increases time to pay, and reduces the number of mailed statements.

New set-it-and-forget-it technology now allows you to automatically send text, email, and mailed statements intermittently, reducing staff workload on payments. Once a patient makes a payment, the communication cycle ends. Automation guarantees that patients are receiving their statements at the right time while eliminating the possibility of human error. Take your time back and automate.
 

3. Provide an Enhanced Payment Experience

We’ve all experienced this scenario as patients. The third statement from your doctor finally arrives and you place it on top of the last two statements currently sitting on your countertop, somehow thinking it will go away. It’s not that you don’t want to pay your bill, it’s that health care bills have become so confusing and payment methods haven’t changed since the ‘80s.

Today we live in an “on-demand” world and consumers have become accustomed to a frictionless, click-to-pay technology in every other area of their lives. It’s time healthcare delivers a similar experience.

Kareo can help

With our new Automated Patient Billing solution, we can help you deliver pre-programmed text, email and mailed billing statements to your patients, which will ensure that you are communicating to them in the right way, at the right time.

With Kareo Automated Patient Billing, you have access to an easy-to-read dashboard, keeping you updated on how your automated statements are performing, including the amount collected as well as any statement delivery errors.

A patient statement activity page provides detailed information on individual patients and where they are in the automated payment cycle. It doesn’t get easier than that. Now is the time to take the guesswork out of your patient collections and allow pre-programmed patient messaging save you time and get you paid faster.

Let Kareo show you how to modernize your patient collections so your practice can join other industries in getting paid faster and easier. Learn more by visiting our Kareo Patient Collect page here.