Readers Write: Climbing Out of the Pool of Unpaid Patient Payments

Climbing Out of the Pool of Unpaid Patient Payments
By Hanny Freiwat

Feel like you’re swimming in unpaid patient invoices? It’s a common problem in physician practices today. In fact, when a patient leaves the office without paying, 79 percent of those fees owed end up going uncollected. Studies have shown that it’s not that patients don’t want to pay, but that there isn’t a convenient option for paying. In this changing landscape, healthcare operations have not quite caught up with consumer-centric technology needs and expectations. You can change that for your practice.

Here are four easy ways for physician practices to increase patient payments before the end of the year, decrease accounts receivables, and avoid high bad-debt rates.

Number One: Offer an easy-to-access online payment link on the practice’s website. If you already have one available on your patient portal, ask your accounts receivable manager how many payments come through there. If it is near zero, which is the case with most practices, find an easier way that doesn’t require a user name and password. Look for payment partners who understand HIPAA and PCI compliance, and set up a link today. Make sure that you advertise the new payment link on your invoices and in the office. Patients and guarantors want convenience – not more passwords to remember. This solution should take one to two hours to implement, in addition to the research time.

Number Two: Add a card-on-file policy to your existing financial policy, complemented by any pro bono services you offer. Find a technology and payment partner who has a PCI-compliant service and implement it immediately. The solution should be patient friendly and have a limit on how much you can charge their credit or debit card. Train your staff on usage, and more importantly, on having the conversation with the patients before they get the service. If your patients are not willing to vault (secure) a card on file with you, there is a good chance they will not pay the bill. This solution is more involved and can take 10-15 hours to implement due to integration and staff training.

Number Three: Validate the patient’s insurance eligibility days prior to the service date, or at least when the patient walks in if you’re an urgent care clinic or similar walk-in practice. Make sure that the technology you’re using is delivering the data you need for your specialty and not a generic data dump. Use that data to determine your risk and the amount you should collect at the time of service, and how much to vault on your card-on-file solution for post-claim collections. If you’re not sure how much copay you should collect, vault a card on file to avoid confusion and refund expenses. This solution should be available through your current EHR and PM systems. If not, start thinking about getting a complementary solution as soon as possible. With ACA and MCOs, this is more important than ever. You need a “Know Your Patient” solution in place in 2016 or expect to get double hit by narrow networks and confused patients. Depending on your practice size, this could take as little as a week or as many as two to three months.

Number Four: Get on the cutting edge and look for other ways for your patients to pay. Medical mobile bill pay and price estimator vendors are out there. Find and partner with those that understand your patient needs. This might sound foreign in healthcare, but we’re all consumers and know how to use the tools. Time spent to implement this will depend on the solution and vendor you choose.

Going forward, look at your job descriptions and make sure that you have financial counseling and payment collections as part of the duties of your scheduling and front office teams. Fully implementing this strategy will drive your patient responsibility revenue to near 100 percent. In addition, you should see savings from less billing and less traditional payment collections. Once you fully make the shift, you and your staff will be free to get back to the business you love – caring for patients.

Hanny Freiwat is president of Wellero in Portland, OR.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

News 11/2/15

Top News

Healthcare.gov’s third open enrollment kicks off, with nary an IT meltdown-related headline in sight (none have made it to my inbox, at any rate). The site made news in the weeks leading up to November 1 for its scramble to fine-tune comparison-shopping features, and inadvertently approving fake applicants. HHS is of course still working to reach the 10 million consumers who remain uninsured, focusing on a variety of digital media outreach campaigns, as well as a new app that helps shoppers find the most appropriate plan for their level of healthcare utilization.   

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Rarely does my obsession with healthcare and technology overlap with the interests of friends and family, who typically nod their heads politely when I explain to them how exciting it is to work for HIStalk. The launch of a new antimicrobial paint for healthcare facilities from Sherwin-Williams has changed all that, giving me and my neighbor (a higher up at SW) a chance to exchange statistics related to hospital-acquired infections. The new 59-color Paint Shield line promises to kill nearly 100 percent of several types of infection-causing bacteria up to two hours after exposure, and lasts for four years. It launches early next year.

I’m heading to the Health IT Leadership Summit tomorrow, an annual event I’ve attended for several years now. As with most conferences, it’s really all about the networking, though I am looking forward to the “Insider’s Look at EHR Vendors” panel featuring reps from Epic, Greenway, Cerner, and RelayHealth. Feel free to follow along via my live updates from @JennHIStalk.

Webinars

November 11 (Wednesday) 2:00 ET. “Trouble Upstream: The Underinsured and Cash Flow Challenges.” Sponsored by TransUnion. Presenter: Jonathan Wiik, principal consultant, TransUnion Healthcare. The average person spends nearly $15,000 per year on healthcare as deductibles keep rising. Providers must educate their patients on plan costs and benefits while controlling their own collection costs by using estimation tools, propensity-to-pay analytics, and point-of-sale collections. This webinar will highlight industry trends in managing underinsured patients and will describe ways to match patients to appropriate funding.

November 12 (Thursday) 1 :00 ET. “Top Predictions for Population Health Management in 2016 and Beyond.” Sponsored by Medecision. Presenters: Tobias C. Samo, MD, FACP, FHIMSS, CMIO, Medecision; Laura Kanov, BS, RRT, MBA, SVP of care delivery organization solutions, Medecision. With all the noise and hype around population health management, the presenters will share their predictions for 2016 and their insight into meeting the mounting pressures of value-based reimbursement and the tools and technology needed to manage care delivery.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

EClinicalWorks partners with retail chain Specsavers, which operates over 1,700 optical and hearing stores in 10 countries. The company will integrate the EClinicalWorks EHR and PM platform into its CRM, finance, product data, and global store-ordering systems. SpecSavers has implemented the technology in New Zealand, and plans to roll it out to stores in the UK, Australia, and Europe.

Startupbootcamp, Europe’s largest business accelerator, brings its program to the US by way of Miami, where it will launch a program focused on supporting and scaling digital health companies. Ten companies will be selected each year to participate in the three-month program; chosen startups will receive six months of free co-working office space, $20,000 in seed funding, and in-kind services from partners including Amazon Web Services and Google. Applications for the first class, kicking off in Spring 2016, are due February 1.

And speaking of healthcare IT in Miami … the Miami Herald paints a pretty compelling picture of South Florida’s booming HIT business, citing heavy 2015 VC funding rounds for MDLive, Modernizing Medicine, and OrthoSensor, plus an employment boom generated by CareCloud and MDLive.

HP completes its planned split into HP Inc., which will sell personal computers and printers; and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which will sell computer servers, data storage, networking, software, and consulting services. Each company is expected to generate an annual revenue of $50 billion. HP executives Dion Weisler and Meg Whitman will lead HP Inc. and HPE, respectively.

People

Milton Silva-Craig (Q-Centrix) joins the HealthMyne Board of Directors.

Peter Antall, MD (Online Care Group) joins American Well as its first chief medical officer.

WEDI awards its annual HIT Government Champion Award to Shana Olshan, director of the National Standards Group at the Office of Enterprise Information at CMS.

Announcements and Implementations

Banner Medical Group rolls out RCM solutions from Zotec Partners to its 17 anesthesiologists and 31 CRNAs in Northern Colorado.

ZappRx signs up for the ePrescribing State Law Review from Point-of-Care Partners. The specialty medication management IT vendor will use the data set to prepare its staff and end users for new eprescribing mandates.

Government and Politics

HHS launches an investigation into Republican State Senate candidate Siobhan Dunnavant, MD’s alleged use of private patient data to solicit contributions, volunteers, and votes via email and letter-writing campaigns. At issue is whether or not patient information was viewed by anyone outside of Dunnavant’s practice, a HIPAA violation that could result in hefty fines.

CMS releases the final Medicare physician payment rules. At a whopping 1,358 pages, I have decided to abstain from attempting to pluck out the highlights. (I’m secretly hoping Dr. Jayne will do the dirty work for me.)

Building on the success of Health Datapalooza and successive federal datapalooza events, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announces plans for a 2016 government-wide data exposition that will highlight how open government data and APIs are being used in innovative ways across industry sectors and federal agencies.

Telemedicine

The American Telemedicine Association expresses its concerns with the State of Arkansas’ draft telemedicine proposal, focusing on language relating to informed consent, eprescribing, and practice standards. “[W]e believe that the Board’s proposed draft will require licensed Arkansas physicians to follow a separate standard of practice when using telemedicine,” the ATA writes, “resulting in two different standards of care for patients in the same state.” The Arkansas State Medical Board will meet on Wednesday to discuss the proposal.

Research and Innovation

A study of 2,147 patients finds that those with access to their physician’s notes via a Web portal showed improved medication adherence. Nearly 80 percent of patients with access to notes from their PCPs were adherent to their antihypertensive medication regimen, versus 75.3 percent of the control group.

Other

Medial Associates of Albany (GA) staffers have some serious fun participating in the practice’s fifth annual costume contest.

A Health Affairs study of four major restaurant chains in New York City finds that the practice of displaying calorie counts next to menu items has little to no bearing on a patron’s decision to choose healthy fare. One of the researchers makes a very good point in noting that diners at fast food restaurants typically don’t eat at those establishments for health reasons. If they’re anything like me, they’re looking to get a quick and cheap fix for a particular craving. As with most things healthcare, the report concluded that the “greatest impact of mandatory menu labeling on population health may come from restaurants’ changing the calories of their menu items instead of consumers’ changing their behavior.”

Sponsor Updates

• Leidos Health will exhibit at the NextGen User Conference November 1-4 in Las Vegas.
• PerfectServe will exhibit at ASN Kidney Week November 3-8 in San Diego.

Blog Posts

• Population Health: Not a One-Size-Fits-All Endeavor (Medicity)
• Growing, Teaching: a Way of Life at Nordic (Nordic)

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

Population Health Management Weekly Wrap Up 11/1/15

Population health management technology vendor Lightbeam Health Solutions expands, doubling its previous office space with a relocation to the top floor of Urban Towers in Irving, TX.

Verisk Analytics makes its intentions known with regard to the possible sale of its Verisk Health data analytics business, which includes population health management tools. (Mr. H reported the rumor on October 14.) “Verisk Health is an excellent business in a very attractive, growing market,” says Verisk Analytics President and CEO Scott Stephenson. “However, after much thought and consideration we have determined to explore alternative uses for shareholder capital that are more closely aligned with our strategy and global ambitions.”

Truman Medical Centers (MO) and Cerner will work together in piloting healthcare IT and giving Cerner employees on-site experience as part of a 10-year “living lab” partnership, the ultimate goal of which aligns with the Triple Aim. “There’s a number of ways we can do that,” says Cerner CEO Burke. “Whether it’s how we help some of the population connect to the appropriate venue of care through use of technologies … and understanding more about that person. So when they enter the system, we can put them in the appropriate care. … We’ll work on our system about how you take social data and how you take clinical to get the highest quality outcome at lower cost.” TMC has been a Cerner client since 1992, when it implemented the company’s Millenium EHR.

The Missouri Coalition for Community Behavioral Healthcare selects the Netsmart CareManager care coordination solution to better manage the home health patients of several of its community mental health centers. In addition to aggregating clinical and claims data, the new tool will also enable risk stratification and population health monitoring.

Summa Health System receives a $6 million gift – the largest in its history – from local philanthropists Ann and David Brennan, the bulk of which it plans to use on population health initiatives.

Legacy Health (OR) pays $100 million for a 50-percent interest in PacificSource Health Plans as part the creation of a nonprofit, integrated health system – the first of its kind in the state. The new nonprofit will hold the other 50 percent stake. Legacy Health President and CEO Dan Brown explains that the partnership is the next step in the six-hospital system’s population health management journey, adding that the “market demands flexibility and adaptability. We can create new products to combine our strengths to manage care of our patients and to have better experience for patients and providers and get costs down.”

Mount Sinai Health System (NY) partners with digital health company Livongo Health to offer a diabetes management program for the city incorporating a data analytics platform that captures information from Livongo’s connected glucose meters, personal devices, EHRs, and medication records. Alerts and insights are then sent in real time to the patient, as well as to their network of caregivers and Mount Sinai care team.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

News 10/29/15

Top News

HHS extends its contract with DScape Interactive for further development of the Security Risk Assessment tool, which the company debuted in 2013 as a HIPAA-compliance application for small and mid-sized physician practices. DScape plans to upgrade the app with improved reporting functionality and compatibility with updated versions of Windows, as well as offer users the ability to save different versions of the app’s compliance survey for easier sharing.

Webinars

November 12 (Thursday) 1 :00 ET. “Top Predictions for Population Health Management in 2016 and Beyond.” Sponsored by Medecision. Presenters: Tobias C. Samo, MD, FACP, FHIMSS, CMIO, Medecision; Laura Kanov, BS, RRT, MBA, SVP of care delivery organization solutions, Medecision. With all the noise and hype around population health management, the presenters will share their predictions for 2016 and their insight into meeting the mounting pressures of value-based reimbursement and the tools and technology needed to manage care delivery.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

Updox adds integrated electronic faxing and document management services to the Direct messaging it already offers Practice Fusion customers.

People

Matt Halle (Welltok) joins WiserTogether as chief growth officer.

Martin Cody (Aprima) joins TSI Healthcare as vice president of sales.

Telemedicine

EZDoctor, best known for its Web-based physician background check and appointment-scheduling tools, offers telemedicine services to travel insurance company April’s globetrotting customers.

Trim Nutrition expands its wellness-centric TeleWellnessMD platform to include basic and comprehensive lab panels. It soon plans to offer options for methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase and micronutrient testing, as well as new products and services including treatment protocols for fibromyalgia.

The local paper profiles the evolving business model of Ardina, a telemedicine membership and healthcare discount startup that got its start in the Rev1 Ventures incubator program in Columbus, OH. In addition to personal membership plans that provide around-the-clock telemedicine services, the company is also partnering with local health insurance brokers to break into the employer market as an add-on to traditional insurance plans. “We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how younger consumers in the … freelance economy are taking a lot of interest,” says Chief Customer Officer Stephanie Murnen. 

Research and Innovation

A months-long study finds that Medisafe medication management app users taking cholesterol, diabetes, and hypertension medication had higher rates of adherence – 10.7 percent, 7.7 percent, and 5.4 percent, respectively – than did a control group of patients that did not use the app. The results are similar to an internal Medisafe study conducted last month with users suffering from high blood pressure.

Other

There’s a healthcare IT user experience lesson in here somewhere: Facebook gives its staff a taste of what its users in developing countries experience everyday via “2G Tuesdays.” The company will slow down its site for one hour every Tuesday to replicate the experience of accessing the platform via a 2G connection. “They’re going to see the places that we need to improve our product,” says Engineering Director Tom Alison, “but they’re also going to see the places where we have made a lot of progress.” Over half of Facebook’s 157 million users in Africa connect to the site via the slower speed.

The Atlantic offers a fascinating glimpse into the career of Martin Couney, MD and his pioneering work with incubators for preemies in the first half of the 20th century. Couney introduced the concept of placing premature infants in incubators to the medical profession via traveling exhibitions at Coney Island and the World’s Fair, among other international stops, charging onlookers nominal fees to offset costs of care for  parents.

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.

News 10/28/15

Top News

A GAO audit finds that, yet again, Healthcare.gov approved applications of at least 10 fake applicants, granting them premium tax credits and cost-sharing reduction subsidies. It should be noted that eight of the fake applicants did fail to pass an initial identify checking step, but were still approved after calling for support. While the GAO’s “sting” shows that CMS still needs to shore up its applicant verification process, it also shows that some perspective on the operation may be in everyone’s best interest. “It’s important to consider whether it’s likely that uninsured Americans would replicate the next actions the GAO took,” explains Meaghan Smith senior adviser for healthcare at HHS, “namely knowingly and willfully providing false information in violation of federal law, which could subject the individual to up to a $250,000 fine.”

HIStalk Practice Announcements and Requests

Note to vendors already thinking about what to give away at HIMSS16: Ember develops a travel mug that cools and keeps coffee at a consistent temperature of the user’s choosing for nearly four hours. The mug features a two-hour battery life and comes equipped with a charging coaster. And yes, there is an accompanying app that lets you keep an eye on your beverage’s temperature. The mugs will start shipping next April for $129. While HIMSS giveaway winners will have to wait a few weeks for their prize, coffee/tech lovers will likely think it worth the wait.

Webinars

November 12 (Thursday) 1 :00 ET. “Top Predictions for Population Health Management in 2016 and Beyond.” Sponsored by Medecision. Presenters: Tobias C. Samo, MD, FACP, FHIMSS, CMIO, Medecision; Laura Kanov, BS, RRT, MBA, SVP of care delivery organization solutions, Medecision. With all the noise and hype around population health management, the presenters will share their predictions for 2016 and their insight into meeting the mounting pressures of value-based reimbursement and the tools and technology needed to manage care delivery.

Contact Lorre for webinar services. Past webinars are on our HIStalk webinars YouTube channel.

Announcements and Implementations

San Antonio-based Musculoskeletal Imaging Consultants selects cloud VNA technology from Dicom Systems to support its radiology and HIE services.

Surescripts selects Kno2’s interoperability solution to better connect health IT vendors. The integration will also enable Surescripts end users to securely send and receive messages using the company’s clinical Direct messaging.

EHR Integration Services adds Eagle Dream Health’s analytics platform to its Quality Information System, offering physician practices insight into the relationship between clinical outcomes and cost and claims data.

Acquisitions, Funding, Business, and Stock

Hallmark Health Care Solutions and consulting firm ECG develop a cloud-based physician compensation development and management tool. The new Heisenberg II solution is the first in a series of jointly developed products from the two companies.

Healthcare transaction advisory firm VMG Health receives an undisclosed investment from private-equity firm Quad-C Management. VMG, which employs over 100 staff in its Dallas and Nashville offices, will maintain ownership of the business.

People

Scott McClintock (Have Marketing, Will Travel) joins Ingenious Med as chief marketing officer.

Government and Politics

Maine Health Data Organization launches CompareMaine.org, offering residents the ability to compare the average cost of over 200 medical procedures at over 170 facilities across the state. The site, which also offers quality data, was developed by the state agency with funds from CMS. For those keeping score, Maine received a “B” for its healthcare price transparency efforts, according to a July 2015 report from the Healthcare Incentives Improvement Institute and Catalyst for Payment Reform. No doubt the new website will propel Maine to join New Hampshire as the only other state to receive an “A.”

Telemedicine

The State of Illinois plays host this week to the Federation of State Medical Boards inaugural meeting of the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact Commission. The meeting agenda includes fairly ho-hum housekeeping items such as the election of officers and formation of working groups, budgetary discussions, and development of a timeline for future meetings. The commission’s ultimate goal is to develop a multistate licensing process that will better enable physicians in participating states (there are 11 so far) to practice across state lines – a boon for those looking to jump into telemedicine.

Other

Finally, a company with some common sense: REI refuses to kowtow to frenzied Black Friday shoppers, announcing it will close its stores, website, and distribution center on November 27. Employees will receive holiday pay, and hopefully enjoy some downtime with their families. “We think that Black Friday has gotten out of hand,” says president and CEO Jerry Stritzke, “and so we are choosing to invest in helping people get outside with loved ones this holiday season, over spending it in the aisles.” I’ll raise my turkey leg to that.

Hump Day humor courtesy of @PHEMISystems

Sponsor Updates

• EClinicalWorks will exhibit at the 2015 NJPCA Annual Conference October 28-29 in Las Vegas.

Blog Posts

• Optimize Coding Through Partnerships (AdvancedMD)
• Billian Comes to Boston Event Recap: Update on the Road to Health Data Equity (Billian’s HealthDATA)

Contacts

Jennifer,  Mr. H, Lorre, Dr. Jayne, Dr. Gregg, Lt. Dan

More news: HIStalk, HIStalk Connect.

Get HIStalk Practice  updates.
Contact us online.
Become a sponsor.