Tag: patient engagement
What if you could flag patients who are at risk of readmission? What if you could anticipate missed appointments or know ahead of time that someone is going to face challenges with their care plan? This knowledge could help you improve patient outcomes, streamline staff workflows and improve your bottom line. So how can you get this non-medical information and use it to improve treatment outcomes? A person’s circumstances can help us understand potential challenges in access to care to predict their behaviors More than 80% of health outcomes are unrelated to medical care. Instead, they are attributable to outside social and economic forces, such as housing, education, unemployment, low income, transportation, access to green space, loneliness, inequality and other non-medical factors. These social determinants of health (SDOH) are the living and working conditions that come together in just the right combination to either promote or a limit a person’s health and wellbeing. As a healthcare professional, you’re no doubt aware that people struggling with financial or life circumstances have a more difficult time focusing on their health and subsequently face more urgent hardships. And it isn’t just the patients who suffer. It has a negative impact on the entire healthcare ecosystem. Why providers should care about social determinants of health When patients struggle to access healthcare services, they’re less likely to follow treatment plans or adhere to follow-up visits. They’re more likely to need to come back with more serious conditions that could have been detected earlier, had they felt equipped to follow the care plan. Not only is this worrying for the patient, but it also leads to excessive service utilization that is costly for providers. Missed appointments are estimated to cost the US healthcare system a massive $150 billion, while each unused 60-minute slot costs an average of $200. And that’s not to mention the opportunity cost of equipment and rooms sitting idle, and all those wasted hours of billable physician time. The shift to value-based care puts more pressure on providers to improve outcomes. But how can they do that when those outcomes are partially determined by factors beyond their control? Considering that 68% of patients have at least one social determinant challenge, the only sensible move is to bring solving for SDOH to the forefront of care planning. “No patient wants to skip appointments and dial 911 as their only reliable means to get the care they need,” said Karly Rowe, Experian Health vice president of product management. “We want to level the playing field by helping providers identify and solve for these socio-economic challenges that make it hard for some patients to get the care they need. SDOH has the ability to improve outcomes, lower costs and increase patient satisfaction, removing the socio-economic obstacles hindering healthcare.” An example of providers and payers collaborating to solve for social determinants of health is the Aligning for Health coalition, which in 2016 referred 33,000 patients to community initiatives. Andy Friedell, a senior vice president at Maxim Healthcare Services said of the program: “We are prioritizing community-based care and social determinant solutions for our patients and clients. In fact, we have effectively used these tools to help reduce readmissions by over 65% for high-risk patients.” How can social determinant data improve outcomes? Let’s look at two examples of how healthcare providers might analyze social determinants to help improve care management. 1. Reducing appointment no-shows For many patients, a lack of transportation is the main barrier to compliance. How do they get to an appointment or procedure if they don’t have a car, don’t live in an area well served by public transport, and can’t afford a cab? Looking at vehicle registration data and public transport services in the area would be one way for a provider to gauge access to care. But does that give the full story? Even if they can find transport, are they juggling two jobs? Do they need childcare? By synthesizing data on transportation, family arrangements, average incomes, and more, providers can anticipate the propensity of someone being unable to access care, and offer solutions such as a free hospital bus service or crèche facility. 2. Preventing escalated health conditions Understanding social determinants is not about identifying unhealthy behavior. For example, a provider might see poor health and point to poor diet. But a patient’s poor diet may not simply result from poor choices. A provider who’s aware of the potential impact of social determinants might consider the propensity of food insecurity – maybe the patient doesn’t have access to healthy food? However, putting the patient at the center and truly understanding social determinants means thinking beyond the ‘food desert’ explanation. Even where healthy food is available, the ability to eat it might be limited by lack of time to cook it, or money to buy it. The provider must adjust their lens and understand how a stressful work schedule, chaotic household and readily available cheap food converge to make it virtually impossible for the patient to even think about putting their health first with a healthy meal. As a result, a patient who could have been identified early on with symptoms indicating the onset of diabetes, for example, instead has their diagnosis delayed because they can’t get to an appointment, while their condition worsens due to their unhealthy diet. Instead of offering dietary advice or signposting to a wholesome supermarket, the provider might choose to work with a registered dietician nutritionist, direct patients to community resources, participate in community partnerships, or even engage with local planning departments and commercial developers. When you understand what drives your patients and recognize the real barriers preventing them from prioritizing or accessing healthcare, you can proactively identify opportunities to solve them. 3. Using the right data to understand and solve for social determinants of health Better care management and improved health outcomes start with understanding the whole patient and the social determinants impacting their life, and then turning those insights into actions. For providers to be proactive, preventative and patient-friendly, they need to know the patient’s socioeconomic background before they enter the room. They must have an idea of what that conversation should look like before they even say hello, and know which SDOH-related programs might be relevant to this patient. Analytics platforms can help leverage wider consumer data sets to spot patterns that affect operational efficiencies so providers can offer more patient-centered care. Of course, if you’re using consumer data, you must have confidence both in its accuracy and in your ability to safeguard consumer privacy. Both can be achieved if you work with a data management partner who can collect data from consumers at scale, with solutions that check all the privacy boxes necessary to allow this data to be used in a healthcare setting. So if you weren’t already thinking about what social determinants of health mean for your organization, perhaps think about what you could do now to incorporate a solution that tells you what patients need, provides the right amount of context to understand what external factors might be causing or affecting that need, and then solve for it at the point of care. — The solution exists to help you. You could have the power to identify and solve for social determinants at your fingertips.
Whether it’s due to pressure from governing bodies or price-shopping health consumers, many healthcare organizations are being challenged with price transparency efforts. With so many moving parts to determine a patient’s financial liability, how can accurate patient estimates be provided in a timely manner? Giving patients the right pricing information at the right time Like many healthcare systems, Blessing Health relied on various printouts and spreadsheets of price lists from different departments of the hospital to provide patient estimates. Lists needed to be manually updated, and the staff often relied on outdated information. The process wasn’t standardized, and estimates were inconsistent across the enterprise. While Blessing wanted to make sure that patients were getting accurate information, the estimates didn’t consider a patient’s insurance information. Since patients weren’t understanding their true financial obligation, it caused frustration among patients and employees. In today’s competitive environment, it’s important to reduce instances in the patient journey that might cause irritation. A recent report from Trends in Healthcare Payments, notes that patients who are satisfied with billing are five times more likely to recommend the hospital. At a time when hospitals are being asked to do more with less and reduce the cost of care, manual processes and work must be reduced and automated with data to provide accurate information. Patient liability estimation is a complex process of calculating multiple components, not easily available to users, including insurance benefits, charges, contractual adjustments and provider discounts. If hospital staff are manually estimating the processes, they could be using outdated pricing lists which may not include application of insurance benefits, contract rates, and discounts. As consumers gain access to pricing information, health leaders should invest in data-driven technology that can provide consumers with accurate personalized estimates. Most healthcare organizations already have the basic data they need to use automated technology to construct estimates for basic services, including claims data, real-time eligibility and benefits information, payer contracts and charge description master (CDM) information. Blessing Health knew they needed to find a way to advise patients of their financial liability, as well as give staff a tool they could confidently use to request patient payments upfront to increase collections. They wanted real-time estimates that were personalized based on a patient’s insurance and contract information. To do this, Blessing Health reached out to Experian Health to integrate Patient Estimates into their Allscripts® workflow. What to look for in price estimator tools Healthcare organizations should implement price transparency and collection practices that are standardized across the enterprise. A pricing transparency tool eliminates the need for manually updating price lists, and removes the guesswork and tedious manual processes, which often result in outdated, inaccurate estimates. Price transparency software should also include reporting features that give greater control over the process and can be agile in managing transparency initiatives as well as track potential versus actual collections. A price transparency tool should highlight a patient’s financial situation, as well as their propensity to pay, allowing you to optimize your collection strategies from the start and get patients on the right programs. To help reduce traffic to call centers, a price transparency tool should be integrated into consumer-facing estimates that are personalized and available through a web portal or mobile app. Price estimation can help with patient collections Through an automated, data-driven process, Blessing Health is now able to provide personalized patient estimates that are 80 percent to 90 percent accurate. (Inaccuracies result from unexpected tests or procedures.) As a result, Blessing Health benefited from a 58 percent increase in point-of-service patient collections. Based on the cost to implement these services, Blessing Health experienced a 1,200% return on investment. After realizing success on the hospital side, Blessing Health implemented Patient Estimates for their physician group as well. — Learn more about how you can empower the patient financial experience.
The healthcare industry is starting to embrace the use of consumer data to help achieve better treatment outcomes, engage patients in meaningful ways, market to health consumers, and identify social determinants of health among their patient population. As consumers now spend an estimated $3.5 trillion annually on healthcare in the U.S. (approximately $10,348 per consumer), they expect the healthcare industry to create modern and innovative experiences for their care journey. Those experiences can only be created through data-driven insights. When it comes to the world of data, where can we start? What if we could use health data and other variables like socioeconomics to predict missed appointments, noncompliance with medications, and patient trajectory over time? By learning how to apply data analytics to practice management workflows, we will improve the delivery of patient care by zeroing in on the best in social determinants of health. Data insights can also forge stronger customer and patient relationships, foster brand loyalty, and drive decisions around how to interact with consumers in ways that consider their lifestyles, attitudes and preferences. Those insights help deliver tailored messages to patients that are relevant to every stage of their journey. And what about applying credit data to create a personalized, nearly invisible, payment experience for patients? As patients express that paying their bill is a top pain point in their health journey, we look to use the right data insights to fuel collection strategies by offering patients financial assistance and payment plans at the point of service to ensure a positive patient financial experience. The right data can transform patient and consumer experiences in healthcare. However, it’s important to have access to clean, original-source data, as well as analytics to gain insights that drive decisions and achieve results. Household data, marketing data, credit data and of course healthcare data can all offer a more complete view of today’s healthcare consumer. If you are attending HIMSS19, join us in booth 2033 to hear one of our presentations on using data in the patient experience to earn CE credits.
As of January 1, 2019, thousands of hospitals in the U.S. are being required to post an online list of the cost of their services due to a new requirement by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). However, amid growing confusion about which fields are required or what format the list of standard services needs to be in, many health systems feel this new law will only create confusion among patients. One health system described the new requirements as, “It would be like walking into a car dealership looking at a new car, asking the salesman how much the car was going to cost and having them hand you the parts catalog. Obviously, when you have the parts catalog, you don't know what parts are in your car or which ones you're going to use or how much labor is going to go into making the car." While posting the list of prices is required by CMS, some health systems have invested in the needed technology to make it easy for patients to shop online for care. For example, in an interview with Modern Healthcare, El Camino Hospital explains they “launched a consumer self-service tool in May 2017, after about a year of development work with Experian Health. Since then, more than 3,000 people have visited the hospital's website, selected one or more of about 90 medical or surgical services they were interested in, entered their insurance information, and received an instant out-of-pocket cost estimate the hospital claims is 95% to 99% accurate.” Health systems like El Camino Hospital know that patients want to avoid costly surprises, and they should be able to understand their financial obligations upfront, including deductibles and copays. In fact, McKinsey research found nearly three-quarters of participants were worried about healthcare expenditures. Legislative help The new CMS requirement is only one of a few initiatives in the works from a legislative standpoint. In an effort to help patients, some members of Congress are trying to bring attention to the topic. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators in 2018 wrote a letter to healthcare stakeholders and experts requesting information in an effort to learn more about price transparency as they considered possible legislation on the matter. Also in the letter, the senators cited the lack of state laws and regulations requiring healthcare providers to make that information available to patients. More than 40 states were cited by the Catalyst for Payment Reform and the Health Care Incentives Improvement Initiative in 2016 because they were deficient in healthcare transparency legislation. And that same report found that some patients were paying thousands of dollars more than others for the same procedures, depending which healthcare provider they used. Alleviating patient stress Transparency in billing creates more satisfied patients because they know how much they will be paying for services, which makes it easier for them to budget. Going to the hospital is usually a stressful time for patients and their families. An easy way for healthcare providers to alleviate that stress is to help patients understand their costs upfront Most healthcare organizations already have the basic data they need to use automated technology to construct estimates for basic services, including claims data, real-time eligibility and benefits information, payer contracts and charge description master (CDM) information. Experian Health has the technology to help healthcare organizations convert this information into patient costs through Patient Estimates. This kind of transparency provides several benefits to both providers and patients. Online estimates published on healthcare provider websites give patients access to the information any time, including late at night and on weekends. And these estimates can be obtained confidentially, so patients who may be uncomfortable asking about certain procedures can find that information on their own. And that helps them be more relaxed about making appointments and scheduling treatments because they have confidence they won't face billing surprises. This feel-better result of having prices at their fingertips has a clear benefit for the healthcare providers as well. Patients are able to plan and pay for services, decreasing unpaid balances for hospitals and other healthcare providers. Ability to budget for healthcare costs Patients who know what to expect can budget wisely and actively take charge of their healthcare bills. They go in with their eyes open, which leads to improved revenue cycle management. In the end, both the patient and the hospital get what they want. With Congress and state legislatures looking at transparency in healthcare, providers can expect to see more of these rules. Healthcare organizations can get ahead of them with software like Experian Health's Patient Estimates. Healthcare consumers don't like surprises in their billing. Price transparency gives them the information and peace of mind they need to secure healthcare services and be assured that they know what they will be paying for them. Learn more about how Experian Health can help you achieve price transparency for your patients.
In healthcare, patient-facing technology and electronic health records are meant to improve the overall patient experience. Yet, in a recent Black Book survey, the limited use of these technologies by some organizations has diminished the experience for 89 percent of their younger patients. More specifically, 69 percent of respondents said that dissatisfaction was due mainly to the discharge and billing process. A lack of transparency, confusion about what the total costs are, and borderline harassment from third-party collections agencies can ruin otherwise great experiences. What’s lacking? To achieve the level of engagement and transparency that consumers demand, hospitals need to offer more than just electronic records. In Black Book’s survey, 78 percent of hospitals aren't prioritizing investing in the IT necessary to offer more. That number is shrinking, though, as hospitals depend more on payments from patients. A brief prepared by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology showed a 10 percent jump in the use of IT, such as patient portals, between 2014 and 2017. However, 24 percent of patients won’t view their EHRs despite being offered access. Many cite privacy concerns, others see no need, and some just don’t know how. While confusing and unclear billing processes can negatively impact the patient experience, the opposite is also true. When organizations make it easy for patients to understand and pay their bills, their patients are more satisfied with their experiences. That requires revamping both billing and customer service — the two most important avenues of engagement. 3 areas to improve To achieve that goal, more healthcare organizations and hospitals are turning to online patient portals. They not only give patients access to their records, but also consolidate doctors’ and hospitals’ bills into single, easy-to-understand statements. This increases a patient’s ability and willingness to engage, as well as reduces a hospital’s risk of uncompensated care. Still, patient portals don’t automatically translate to better engagement. They offer a wide range of features and interactions, but they can do little to positively impact the patient experience until organizations become more adept at optimizing them. In many cases, that means changing their approach to these three main obstacles: 1. Limited use A recent Healthcare Financial Management Association survey revealed that 94 percent of organizations that use patient portals only use them to collect payments from patients. This is an important feature of a portal, but it’s only one of several equally important ones designed to create an entire experience for patients. Most portals offer the ability to schedule appointments, receive accurate patient estimates, research and select different payment plans, communicate with care team members, and more. Organizations can use them not only to collect payments, but also to help patients be active participants in the administrative side of their care. 2. Limited interoperability For a healthcare organization to make full use of patient portals and other health IT solutions, large amounts of data must be gathered from many different sources. For a single patient, that data can include financial information from credit bureaus, health histories from other institutions, and data from personal medical devices. Limited interoperability makes it difficult for providers to centralize disparate sources of data, which hinders their patients’ ability to make full use of a portal’s features. By creating a portal around a more comprehensive IT infrastructure, organizations can improve their interoperability and, therefore, their patients’ overall experience. 3. A lack of self-service In the HFMA survey mentioned above, 86 percent of organizations that responded admitted that a portal’s most valuable contribution is creating an intuitive, self-service environment for patients. The ability to schedule appointments and payment plans means organizations don’t have to cold-call patients to remind them of upcoming visits or past-due bills. When hospitals make full use of a patient portal’s features, they can help patients manage their own accounts from home, work, or the doctor’s office. This level of self-service empowers patients to engage in their healthcare, reducing the likelihood of missed appointments, uncompensated care, inadequate patient experiences, and poor health outcomes. The fact that more healthcare organizations are offering patient portal access is encouraging, but low patient interaction means they could do more to optimize that access for maximum engagement. Fortunately, the pieces are there; organizations just have to learn to adapt the rest of their operations to make it all fit together. Start engaging with patients today.
Healthcare consumerism, which describes the ability of patients to shop around for the best value of care, has affected every aspect of the industry. Keeping up with those changes has challenged most institutions as patients become more savvy about healthcare costs and their choices. But the freedom for patients to choose is only one side of the coin. The other is wrought with financial pain points that come with making the traditional billing model fit the new healthcare consumerism. For instance, organizations have to give patients precise cost estimates, but when patients change insurance coverage or companies change their policies and practices, providers struggle to keep those estimates accurate. And patients who are hit with unexpected costs after they’ve received treatment are less likely to be able pay their bills. Hospitals and providers suffer from uncollected bills, which is compounded by claims denials. Fortunately, the idea of healthcare consumerism inherently provides the solution to the pain. Emulating consumerism that's present in other industries, such as retail, means offering accurate and transparent pricing, eliminating uncertainty, and offering patients convenient and comprehensive financial options. Like other industries, healthcare already has a wealth of IT tools to make that possible. Headaches for patients and providers Simplifying financial pain points requires one significant change — hospitals and providers must deliver clear, simple information about what factors into their pricing. The first step is ensuring your system can keep up with the constantly changing details of insurance policies, supplier contracts, and everything else that affects those costs. An automated IT solution can collect up-to-date insurance data, claims history, a patient’s financial situation, your organization’s price, and more before generating an estimate. When this data changes, estimates are no longer accurate, which is why healthcare pricing is so complicated. Therefore, tracking them and updating your system automatically can make it easier. Most of the industry already uses analytics to some degree. Combined with automated financial data-gathering tools, those analytics can help organizations identify patients who are financially at risk and might qualify for additional funding options. Along with clear and accurate estimates, patients highly value a provider that cares enough to offer affordable financing options. Alleviating those pain points Keeping up with policy and other financial changes as quickly as they occur makes healthcare consumerism as beneficial for hospitals and providers as it is for patients. For example, Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers was able to reduce claims denials by 27 percent after implementing payer alerts and patient estimate solutions. The same strategy helped the College of Medicine at Baylor University collect nearly $4.2 million in underpaid contracts, which it would have missed otherwise. Both organizations have also significantly boosted patient satisfaction with their financial processes, which has led to more positive experiences and reviews. You can also alleviate financial pain points for patients and your organization by seeing healthcare consumerism as an opportunity instead of a burden. Patients demand the same level of cost transparency and certainty from every other industry. Healthcare organizations now have the incentive (and the means) to prove that they can offer the same level of service.
Not every healthcare organization embraced electronic medical records (EMRs) at first. But the incentives and regulations put in place by Meaningful Use and the Affordable Care Act have made it necessary to implement them. Now, organizations are not only embracing EMRs, but also making it easier for their patients to access and manage them through remote portals. According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, approximately 63 percent of patients who used portals did so at their doctors’ recommendation. Despite the growing popularity of patient portals, there are still more than 25 percent of patients who refuse to use them for fear of jeopardizing their data. Considering the sensitive nature of their protected health information (PHI), along with the nearly 5.6 million health records that were compromised last year, those fears are more than reasonable. What can providers do? Hackers have honed in on the healthcare industry for two main reasons: the treasure trove of valuable information in medical records and a sometimes dated approach to cybersecurity. In fact, between 2009 and 2016, more than 30 percent of all big data breaches occurred within healthcare systems. Without proper encryption methods, login redundancies, and detection tools, portals are almost as easily accessible to hackers as they are to authorized users. As their usage grows, that lack of security will become an exponentially greater threat to patients’ PHI and identities. “Many of us are accustomed to keeping the same name and password with our accounts, and as we know, that information is very lucrative to the right individuals," says Victoria Dames, Director of Identity Management for Experian Health. "While it's our due diligence to constantly change them, there are certain scenarios where maybe we forgot to change them or we don’t regularly login and that password may sit idle. When that happens, you want to make sure that you have the right technology in place to be able to catch somebody potentially logging in, trying to impersonate a patient.” Providers can’t lower the value of PHI to make it less attractive to hackers, but they can protect it more effectively with up-to-date cybersecurity measures. These four tips can help organizations bring their patient portal security up-to-date and keep their networks safe from unauthorized access: 1. Automate the portal sign-up process. Automating the initial sign-up process can stop false enrollments into the portal at the source. When implemented correctly, the automation will only require the patient to enter a few pieces of information, and then the software can confirm the user’s identity on the back end. 2. Leverage multilayer verification. After patients have signed up to access the portal, using multilayer verification can ensure all future sessions are equally secure. For example, two-factor authentication adds additional protection on top of conventional login credentials. In addition to a password or PIN, users also have to provide something personal such as a cell phone number, ZIP code, fingerprint, iris scan, or more. If the user’s device, account ID, and/or password are compromised, two-factor authentication can ensure the organization’s network remains safe. 3. Keep anti-virus and malware software up-to-date. Multilayer verification protects users’ direct access to portals, but there are other, more frequent vulnerabilities that also need attention. For instance, HIMSS Analytics recently found that 78 percent of providers experienced ransomware and malware attacks last year. Email is the avenue of choice for malware, and these attacks constantly evolve to slip past conventional security measures. If anti-virus software is outdated, it remains vulnerable to every new iteration of malware that attacks the network. Most solutions allow for automatic opt-ins so updates are downloaded and installed as soon as they’re made available. 4. Promote interoperability standards. When primary care physicians, specialists, and healthcare payers talk to one another throughout the course of a patient’s care, it isn’t always through email. When their systems aren’t compatible, they can’t communicate as clearly and securely as they need to. Interoperability makes it possible for disparate systems to share medical histories and patient data while making that data easily understandable on either system. Because interoperability is essential for improving the continuum of care, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provide standards for healthcare organizations to promote it. More patients and providers are optimistic about using technology to improve the healthcare experience. However, one in five patients remain so suspicious of healthcare data security that they refuse to even divulge some information to their physicians. Fortunately, with the right tools, organizations can effectively strengthen portal security and boost the confidence their patients have in them.
The world of healthcare, as everyone knows, can be complex. And in such a complicated system, solutions that simplify, automate, and reduce busywork can make a real difference in both patient satisfaction and workplace efficiency. Although healthcare is, by its nature, a high-touch field, there are several opportunities to allow automated software solutions to handle the basic processing tasks associated with patient management. When routine interactions with patients are automated, medical and administrative staff members can devote more of their time to the cases that need the most attention. Automated workflow solutions also simplify and reduce busywork to make a noticeable difference in patient satisfaction and workplace efficiency. Obviously, that outcome is desirable for all parties involved. It reduces costs, improves morale, and results in satisfied patients. In an ideal workflow environment, employees can personally attend to problem cases and resolve certain issues manually while an automated system handles the run-of-the-mill cases that cause administrative backlogs. Experian Health has worked hard to develop just such a system. We call it eCare NEXT®. Introducing eCare NEXT The eCare NEXT platform, using an approach called Touchless Processing™, is able to offload a number of key patient processes, including scheduling, preregistration, registration, and admissions. Touchless Processing is an exception-based system, meaning that it automatically flags patients who require manual follow-up with staffers. The system updates data in real time, and users can interact with it through either a work queue system or by responding to triggered alerts. Healthcare organizations using the system can automate up to 80 percent of human intervention in the patient management process — allowing healthcare staff to focus on larger, more important initiatives to improve the patient experience. And Touchless Processing doesn't just free up staff time; patients see immediate benefits as well. One of the biggest frustrations in a patient's experience is the inability to get a reliable estimate for how much a service will cost. The eCare NEXT system sorts through all the complex factors that affect healthcare pricing — which are often too complex for hospital billing departments to accurately estimate on their own — and quickly determines accurate cost estimates for both the patient and insurance. Efficiency results in lowered costs — and happier patients The eCare NEXT system cuts costs in other ways, too: by reducing staff training needs, by ensuring compliance, by enforcing transparency, and so on. The benefits of an automated patient management system can manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. Blessing Health System, based in Quincy, Illinois, implemented eCare NEXT and found that it reliably increased efficiency and accuracy in patient management: "Experian Health provided our staff with a reliable, real-time registration error-alerting process. Our overall registration accuracy rate has improved significantly since implementing eCare NEXT. We now have the tools we need to be successful in one user-friendly application." Blessing's employees found that eCare NEXT improved dashboard capabilities and made it easier to view critical data, including missed estimates and copays. It was a clear upgrade over Blessing's previous system, in which employees manually calculated patient estimates. After adopting eCare NEXT, Blessing's point of sale collections increased by over 80 percent, its clean claim rate increased from 63 percent to 90 percent, and denials went down by 27 percent. And because the process had become so much more accurate and efficient, the average number of days an account spent in accounts receivable decreased by 28 percent. There’s no need to labor under an outdated administrative system that's certain to cause backlogs, errors, and intense frustration for patients and staffers. By offloading patient management work to the eCare NEXT system, healthcare providers can do what they do best: help people. For more information, contact Experian Health or check out our Touchless Processing whitepaper.
In the healthcare industry, transparency is everything — you want your patients to be as informed as possible every step of the way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen with pricing, leaving both patients and providers unsure what the final bill is going to be. That’s where Experian Health’s Patient Estimates tool comes in. With this solution, you can provide your patients with timely, accurate projections of the costs of their care either before or at the point of service. By better preparing patients for their bill, Patient Estimates helps you avoid the underpayment problems you’re likely all too familiar with, leaving you more time to focus on providing the care that really matters. The power of accuracy The pricing process in healthcare is complicated. Constantly translating the shifting policies of insurers, suppliers, and partner organizations requires a level of attention that healthcare providers are rarely able to spare. But unless you thoroughly understand all the details that go into a pricing estimate, the only thing you can really offer is speculation. And patients are stressed enough as it is; the last thing they want to worry about is whether their costs are going to unexpectedly skyrocket once the bill comes. Each projection that comes from the Patient Estimates tool undergoes several data-gathering stages before delivering any results. Patient Estimates collects information from the patient’s insurance provider, including claims history and payer contract terms, as well as the hospital's chargemaster price. This data is automatically posted to a centralized work list, which can be customized by a healthcare provider depending on its needs. Imagine you need a price estimate for a patient who needs a common procedure or you’re trying to pinpoint the costs of a very specific procedure. You can narrow your search in the Patient Estimates platform to match your patient’s unique situation, and then you can easily pull that pricing information back up at any time. Most importantly, this data is equally accessible for your patients — you can print estimates in a variety of languages or customize scripts for your staff to read. As altruistic as this all sounds, Patient Estimates isn’t just a way to fulfill an ever-increasing obligation of state mandates for price transparency. Getting accurate pricing estimates slashes the time you’d spend manually updating pricing lists and scrambling to create an audit trail for a patient. By automating this grunt work and providing accurate upfront information, Patient Estimates can make your collections process easy and efficient — not two words you typically associate with collections. “The tool is really behind a lot of our success with billing and quick client payments,” says the Baylor University College of Medicine’s director of patient access. “Partnering with Experian Health has allowed us to be an advocate for our patients while also protecting our bottom line.” Patient Estimates isn't just a useful resource for patients; it's also an efficient tool providers can use to avoid age-old payment problems. After all, your organization runs on payments, and you’d hate to miss out on essential revenue because you didn’t give your patients accurate information in the first place. Bundle up Combining Patient Estimates with other Experian Health services can extend the benefits across a wider range of services. Patient Estimates connects with Eligibility, for example, to generate up-to-date benefits information that can inform a patient's treatment plan. It also works in lockstep with our Contract Manager solution to price estimates based on a provider’s payer contract, no matter how complicated it is. The College of Medicine at Baylor University is among the providers that use Contract Manager to analyze contracts throughout clinical practice departments. After adopting Experian Health's product suite, the school overhauled its internal collections strategy and generated more than 18,000 patient estimates while collecting $4.2 million in contractual underpayments it would have previously missed. Baylor has used its package of Experian Health products not only to streamline its workflow, but also to improve its patient collections rate and negotiate stronger contracts. You don’t have to draw a hard line between helping your patients and making a profit. In fact, the two go hand in hand when you take the right steps. With Patient Estimates, everybody can get on the same page. Contact our team today to find out how to boost transparency in your organization. To learn more about Baylor University College of Medicine’s experience with price transparency, please download this case study.