Rethinking patient payments and providing a consumer-friendly experience

How do you help healthcare organizations navigate the biggest challenges in healthcare?

For health systems, managing patient payments is complex. The resources required to bill patients, process payments and post and reconcile those payments are extensive, and often don’t feel compassionate. For patients, healthcare bills are confusing and unaffordable. Patientco addresses all these issues. Our scalable, consumer-friendly technology eliminates the complexities for health systems by managing every payment stream from every location and supporting enterprise-wide patient payment reporting. Our platform also automates all payment posting and reconciliation, saving time for revenue cycle management teams.

To ease patient challenges, we deliver billing communications through patients’ preferred channels, including email, text or standard mail, and our patient-friendly terms explain what various charges are for and what the patient’s responsibility is. Then, patients have access to modern self-service payment tools to pay-in-full, enroll in a payment plan or apply for financing products. We also use data to personalize billing communication and payment options to ensure each patient has a tailored financial experience.

What advice would you offer to healthcare leaders when choosing among vendors?

First, look at how well the proposed technology complements or integrates with your core business solutions and health information systems (HIS). Healthcare organizations invest millions of dollars in HIS technology, so it’s imperative that add-on solutions work seamlessly with these core systems. New solutions should enable health systems to better leverage their current organizational investments and fill meaningful gaps that core systems were not designed to address.

Second, check that the technology is designed specifically for healthcare. When revenue cycle leaders rely on tools that were not designed for their workflows or industry nuances, they can experience inefficiencies, dissatisfied employees and in many cases,
a negative patient experience.

Lastly, determine whether the vendor or technology delivers measurable results for clients. Ask potential partners for case studies and references of health systems that are similar in size to your own organization. This will give you a realistic view of how partnering with a particular vendor could impact your health system.

What is some advice you can give providers for a successful implementation of a new product or service?

Introduce the tool early, and regularly promote it to potential superusers. This gives certain employees a chance to explore and engage with the new solution sooner, which means they can help train other end users. Also, review your internal resources and stakeholders and determine who should be involved in implementation and who should be kept informed of progress, so that change is managed effectively. 

Quick Facts

• Patientco has been on HFMA’s Short List since  January 2020.
• 100% of clients and prospects surveyed by HFMA would recommend Patientco’s billing and payment platform to colleagues.

About Patientco

Patientco is a healthcare payment technology company founded specifically to streamline the patient payment experience. By combining intuitive payment tools and world-class payment infrastructure, backed by data-led design, we create a superior, compassionate financial experience for patients and deliver more payments to health systems.