Digital Payments Help Remove Uncertainty From Medical Bills
Healthcare, although being one of the most technologically proficient businesses on the globe, lags behind the digital transition in terms of payment technology.
There are a number of contributing causes, the most significant of which is the decade-long shift toward people shouldering a bigger share of healthcare financial obligation, coupled with billing systems that have not kept up. And although progress has been made in this regard, Paymentus Head of Product and Partnerships Chris Trainor told PYMNTS, “50% of customers say healthcare costs are the most difficult of any bill that they have to pay. It’s still problematic.”
Contributing to this is the nonrecurring nature of healthcare payments, particularly for elective operations and specialisations, as well as the continual misunderstanding over what has and has not been paid.
“If you look at investments being made by health systems, they are going up as it pertains to digitizing interactions with patients, as well as unifying back-end systems,” he said. “Without unification, you’re going to have disparate experiences. That’s where we’ve historically seen disparate systems and no unification lead to fragmented customer-patient experiences.”
Paymentus intends to alter this situation by providing health systems with an omnichannel platform that integrates with electronic health record (EHR) systems to enable patient payments at every EHR touchpoint — at registration, in a portal, via text, email or interactive voice response (IVR) — using their preferred payment method, ACH, debit or credit cards, or digital wallets from Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal, with real-time bill posting.
The company announced Oct. 4 an expanded solution set for healthcare providers, “certifying real-time bill posting on one of the most widely used patient portals, Epic MyChart, as well as expanding payment options for patients.”
Trainor described the impact expanded financing options and real-time bill posting may have on the above problem, saying, “not providing preferred payment options can delay payments, and when you don’t have a payment that posts in real time, a patient believes they’ve made a payment, but it’s not being recognised by the health system.”
That situation leads inevitably to the patient not paying at all; the patient calling the billing office for confirmation, which increases costs to an unpaid bill; or the patient then making a payment so over phone, which takes additional staff time and increases the healthcare system payment card industry compliance financial strain, he said, “because cards represent a significant percentage of total transactions in healthcare, especially relative to some other bill pay verticals.”
To avoid the patient not taking action, calling the health system for clarification, or making manual payments, it is essential to provide a consistent experience across touchpoints in which the patient can easily make an instant payment using their preferred payment method and receive instant payment confirmation. This may aid systems in avoiding manual payment procedures and the resulting rise in payment card industry (PCI) load.
Paper Jam Correction
Across the board in digitalization, “healthcare is definitely lagging,” Trainor said. “There’s still a lot of paper bills being presented, paper-based communications, ones that include manual involvement from the healthcare system to the patient, particularly relative to other verticals where you have 60%, 70%, 80% electronic bill presentment adoption.”
As is the case with the new Paymentus interface with Epic’s MyChart, real-time capabilities have a significant influence on collections in the few health systems where they are now available.
“Absent an omnichannel solution integrated into the EHR, paper remains the default,” he said. “With the increasing adoption of platforms like MyChart among healthcare providers and patient utilisation of MyChart, as well as the presentment of liability information in EHR portals, we will see the historical paper paradigm be disrupted in a way that will benefit both the patient and the provider.”
Trainor recognised that there is a link between funding status and treatment outcome, but that it is difficult to measure.
“When a health system is able to receive payment and that payment is recognised and acknowledged by the health system to the patient, you’re able to receive, in many cases, care more expeditiously,” he said. “What we’ve seen is co-payments and patient responsibility being captured in many cases in advance of certain treatments.”
Options That Are Real-Time and Adaptable to Alter Outcomes
Much now depends on the healthcare industry speeding the consumerization trend in the sector beyond prescription discount apps and name-brand walk-in clinics to include the bill pay function.
As in other industries, payment choice and flexibility increase the consumer-patient experience while enhancing debt collection for health institutions holding this debt.
Providing patients with payments choice and flexibility “greatly improves overall payment collection rates and the timeliness of those payments,” Trainor said. “For healthcare providers looking to optimise their revenue cycle offering, that type of flexibility, whether it’s something like a PayPal Credit or instalment payment options using credit cards or other payment instruments, that flexibility is directly correlated with total collectability and reducing the cost to serve.”
With postage rates climbing yearly and the cost of processing (and reprocessing) document interpretations of benefits as well as invoices, he said the cost to bill is rising, and payments flexibility “on the front end” cuts the amount of liability that ends up in collections, which is potent cost control.
