Hospitals and healthcare systems often face challenges in revenue cycle management (RCM). It’s a complex workflow that includes all care delivery and reimbursement components. While much of RCM focuses on claims submitted to insurers, patient collections are also a segment.
Creating and sending healthcare statements with a third party may accelerate payments and boost RCM.
Patient Collections Are Mounting for Providers
An analysis of patient collections revealed that collection rates dropped, and half of those with bad medical debt had insurance. Receiving these payments is also a long process, with 70% of providers stating it takes a month or longer.
As patient responsibility becomes a greater factor with high deductible plans, healthcare is now in the business of sending healthcare statements in great volumes. It’s another transactional communication that must follow the regulations to protect PII (personally identifiable information) and PHI (protected health information).
Outsourcing Health Statements Removes Operational Burdens
The number of regulated mailings healthcare must generate may already be a burden. You may have experienced a bump in collection-related documents. Much of the time, these fees come from insufficient coverage or other changes than what the provider quoted to the patient at the time of care.
These healthcare statements need to get to patients as early as possible. Timeliness could improve payment responses. The reasoning is that if invoices arrive many months after the interaction, the patient may be confused or not even recall the appointment.
If you’re still managing the printing and mailing of these documents in-house, you may not be as prompt or organized as a professional transactional provider.
This operational burden is also costly. You have expenses for equipment, materials, labor, overhead, and more. Since patient collections often do not recover the total amount, these additional costs continuously impact your revenue cycle.
Outsourcing eliminates many of those budget items, so it’s less of a hit financially. Migrating to this model also ensures you’ll see improvements throughout the process.
Efficiency Delivered by Providers Could Boost RCM
When you collaborate with those specializing in healthcare transactional communications, the efficiencies gained could positively affect finances.
Healthcare Statements Arrive Faster
First, there’s the timeliness factor. Once you transmit data to your provider, the workflows for verification, processing, and production can occur in just 24 hours. You can also send batches at various times in the month instead of having to run only one in-house.
Efficient Workflows Yield Greater Accuracy
Second, their efficient and effective workflows take accuracy into account. Simply put, it’s about ensuring the right statements go inside the correct envelope.
Sounds easy enough, but it’s actually a huge challenge when printing and mailing at scale. It requires sophisticated insert technology and scanning of barcodes. Professionals like PCI Group embed this in everything they do for healthcare, which has earned us a 99.9999% accuracy rating.
Personalized Communications Are Scalable
Third, transactional print and mail companies can more efficiently personalize communications. Using the White Paper Factory (WPF), each statement can have dynamic content. It’s a process that marries fully digitally composed files with in-line production and intelligent insertion.
With WPF, there are no pre-printed templates or inserts. If that’s part of your process today, you can remove these pain points by outsourcing.
This personalized messaging could be based on the amount due and days outstanding. You can include specific QR codes to scan to pay online. Another option would be adding an incentive for fast payment, like a percentage off the total bill.
You can test out different messaging to see what drives the best responses and payments.
Work with a Compliant Partner to Streamline Healthcare Statements
Outsourcing has many benefits, as described above, but you may still be hesitant because of compliance requirements. Choosing a compliant partner that makes this a priority is essential. Ensure they meet HIPAA and HITRUST compliance as well as other certifications like SOC I & II
Compliance with healthcare statements must be the centerpiece of their operations. The efficiency gains and cost savings will mean little if they have lapses here.
You can find the ideal partner with our team. We support many in the healthcare field, delivering compliant, accurate, high-quality, and personalized communications. Our work helps them get paid faster and more reliably.
Explore our solutions by requesting a no-cost consultation.
