Pete Heydt is the President of PatientPay, the leading patient payments partner for acute, ambulatory, and specialty care groups. We spoke with Pete—a veteran leader in the healthcare payment technology market—about how medical groups can survive periods of economic instability and create more positive patient financial experiences. We also discussed the benefit to providers and patients when organizations incorporate mobile payment into their overall financial strategy.
With healthcare organizations recently recording the worst financial year to date due to inflation and labor shortages, many had established new techniques for patient financial engagement. In your expert opinion, what are some ways organizations can overcome these challenges? How important is it to include digital communications and payment options into the patient financial engagement process?
Providers do not have control over inflation or labor shortages, which can both greatly impact their bottom line. What they do have control over is how they can increase collections with the right approach to patient financial engagement. Digital communications and payment strategies are essential to getting this right. This means providing seamless, convenient access to the financial information patients need.
Above all else, billing and payments need to be easy to understand and execute for patients. Patients want to pay their bills, but there is often confusion around what is owed and why. If you can clearly communicate this information to patients, you’re ahead of many healthcare organizations out there today. Medical groups provide excellent clinical care, but a substandard financial experience, which significantly affects the overall patient satisfaction. More than half of patients say a negative financial experience has motivated them to leave a bad review of their provider. The key to fixing this isn’t one magic bullet. It’s actually combining many tactical elements in the billing and payment process, including an ability to present the EOB with the patient bill. Ultimately, by enabling consumers to quickly understand and pay their bill, you’re giving them more power over their financial responsibility—ultimately creating feelings of loyalty and trust.
“Slump months” are inevitable, and healthcare organizations sometimes find it hard to financially weather Q1. With your experience working with healthcare organizations, share some successes you’ve seen with implementing digital financial options to patients.
At PatientPay, we see across our clients that text-to-pay strategies greatly improve cash flow and patient engagement by capturing payments faster which is important during “slump months”. By eliminating traditional paper statements and associated delays, in many cases, our medical groups are seeing immediate returns on their investment.
For example, one of our clients, Central Nebraska Rehab—a 16+ location physical, occupational, and speech therapy group—began taking a proactive approach to patient payments by incorporating text-to-pay. Today, they collect over half of electronic payments within the first 14 days of sending a bill notification. It’s an approach that has also decreased inbound calls from patients asking about financial balances and returns more time to staff to focus on things like denials prevention and management. Today, over 80% of card payments processed at Central Nebraska are completed without involving office staff.
How important is it to meet patients’ needs and wants when it comes to payment options and processes? How does this impact the organization’s collections and bottom line?
It’s important to realize that a patient’s financial health is inherently tied to their overall mental health. This also influences behavior around healthcare access and payment. At PatientPay, we take a very data-driven approach to patient communication and the methods and mediums by which we do so. By leveraging behavioral science, we know that the best communication takes place digitally—specifically via text message. Across our clients, we’ve seen many instances where they start receiving payments literally minutes after initializing text-based bills. Some of these patients had never received anything besides a paper statement from a particular provider. I think this speaks volumes to how a patient-oriented solution drives better financial experiences that lead to more payments. The average specialty group takes 45 to 60 days to collect near 20% of patient financial responsibility, but in our experience, 43% of patients who click a payment link received via text go on to pay their bill.
For specialty practices like physical therapy, what are some ways to ensure positive financial engagement when there is a high recurrence of patient visits?
These groups have another layer of challenges due to the volume of claims they are processing on behalf of patients. If a single patient receives care multiple times a week, they generate a claim for each visit. These claims are likely at different phases in the cycle, which means the patient balance is fluctuating. This makes it difficult for patients to understand what they owe and stay on top of payments.
For physical therapy groups, it’s even more important to make it easy for patients to understand what they owe for the care they’ve received. If not, you run the risk that patients will delay payment, choose not to pay it, or get so frustrated with the overall financial experience they won’t return for future services. Mobile pay platforms can be leveraged to quickly break down which charges are for which visit. PatientPay currently sees 71% of its payments coming from a mobile device. By ensuring balances due start with the most recent date of service, patients gain a clearer view of which of their claims have been processed and how much they still owe. This decreases confusion while giving patients greater peace of mind that they are properly managing their financial responsibility.
What benefits do organizations get by moving to a mobile payment platform? What benefits do patients get by using a mobile payment platform like PatientPay?
As I’ve said, the best digital tools meet patients where they are, and patients are always with their smartphone. A mobile pay platform eliminates barriers to payment—like long wait times for paper statements—and delivers very clear instructions for how patients can fulfill their financial responsibility on their own terms. When patients feel in control, they are more likely to manage the cost of care in a timely manner. Mobile pay platforms like PatientPay also have a leg-up on other digital payment methods. The convenience of a digital experience is lost if a patient has to continually login to a patient portal and re-enter their payment information every time they make a payment.
On the provider side, a recent joint study with one of our revenue cycle management partners revealed that 46% of payments are processed in less than 10 days when bills are delivered via text communications which means there is not a need to send a paper statement. If you extend that out to 30 days, that number jumps to 78%. Some of our clients don’t send a paper statement until after the first 30 days based on these capture rates. Overall collections showed an increase in total payments of over 50% when compared year over year. That significant improvement in cash flow plus a reduction in paper statement cost is huge for medical groups—and all it takes is the right mobile pay platform.
You mentioned that patients want more options. Can you explain the options that will create positive patient experiences while also meeting financial goals for healthcare organizations?
Self-service options for account management—like scheduling a single future payment to align with their payroll deposit or the ability to self-enroll in payment plans through text-to-pay—help patients feel more in control of how they approach their financial commitments.
Most of our PatientPay clients have incorporated self-service payment plans into their strategy, and it’s been transformational for patients and the provider’s bottom line. Patients receive text reminders to let them know a few days in advance of when monthly payments are processed—minimizing payment plan failures and boosting online payments. Before, patients often made single low payments every month or so. Not only were patients slower to pay down their balances, but this also increased the administrative burden and overall cost to the provider’s staff. With the new self-service method, patients are setting up larger payment amounts, and they have the ability to manage their balance on their own terms without the staff interaction.