Whitepapers

What Hospitals Need to Know to Improve Their Self-Pay Collections Strategy

Over the years concern for hospital self-pay accounts has taken a backseat to nearly every other activity in the healthcare business and for good reason: self-pay revenues have historically had low recovery rates. In addition, those accounts have comprised a relatively small part of the overall accounts receivable.  Rather than expend time and effort on these accounts, hospitals, instead, focused their resources into improving clinical operations and beefing up processes to speed payments from the government and third party payers. And this made sense.  The landscape has changed, and the time is now for hospitals to reconsider the importance of self-pay account collection to their financial health.

Improving Self-Pay Recovery with Predictive Analytics

The landscape for self-pay accounts receivable management has changed profoundly as a result of healthcare reform. These changes have been felt in hospital business offices across the country, prompting PFS professionals to scramble to address increases in the volume of private pay balances…status quo workflow processes simply cannot keep pace with the change.

The first step to improving performance is to understand the community you serve and your constituents. Standard KPI’s and reporting doesn’t take advantage of today’s business intelligence capabilities and big data analysis. Nor does conventional wisdom based on the experience of the good ole days.

Analytics proves all guarantors are not created equal and identifies granular segments of guarantors’ behavioral patterns and the relative likelihood of individual patients to pay. The key to improved recovery is to use the derived data intelligence to drive the development of effective workflow processes that target guarantors individually.

Learn why workflow automation is key to engaging the responsible party

Endless lectures and articles today tout best practices for self-pay recovery demanding that healthcare providers use tools for scoring and segmenting accounts…but what about the workflow effort? Gone are the days when the self-pay recovery line on hospital’s financial statements could rely solely on the business office managers’ experience and when gut feel determined which accounts would receive an elevated work-effort beyond the routine and status quo statement series before going to collections—how did those calls to accounts with balances over $5,000 work out?

Yet, scoring and segmenting self-pay accounts, whether with an off-the-shelf tool, licensed software, or by traditional early-out vendor, is only part of a move in the right direction. Today’s best practices require more–they require the science of sophisticated behavioral and statistical analytics to truly understand individual guarantors’ attributes in a way real enough to determine who will pay, when they will pay, how much they will pay, and how best to elicit that payment.

Increase Self-Pay Revenue Through Better Patient Engagement

Today’s effective patient billing processes combine advanced analytics and workflow automation to drive a well-planned strategy for Patient Engagement. Individually the concepts are not game changers, however, when perfectly integrated, the synchronization increases active self-pay revenue and boosts patient satisfaction with the billing process.

Studies have demonstrated that a patient’s payment experience colors their overall feelings about a hospital stay. As in retail, customer satisfaction is vital as patients begin to exercise greater choice, both in how much to pay and where to go next time. Generally, the last impression is a lasting one.

Many innovative providers are already rethinking the role of revenue cycle in overall patient engagement strategies, and have discovered that positive billing and payment experiences can impact patient satisfaction and loyalty as well as reduce costs and raise revenue.