Why it is necessary to collect payments from patients during check in?
A business is established primarily to sell a set of products, address particular issues, or provide solutions to something crucial, and earn revenues from the same. Looking at the healthcare industry as a business, revenues are something that the healthcare units or practices simply cannot miss out on!
Yes, it is the patient payments that act as the practice revenues. The patient payment collection, no doubt, is important for the practices, which plays a crucial role in helping the healthcare practices sustain their own share of investments and clear out their debts.
A considerable number of practices lose out a significant part of their revenues annually. According to the reports, more than 40% of the healthcare providers fail to collect over $31,713 a year from the patients, which is huge!
While delving into the loss of practice revenues, recent studies have discovered that around 25%-30% of the income of the medical practices is lost due to incorrect coding, underpricing, missed or never submitted charges by the patients, and improper or no patient followups.
If you monitor closely, you might also find how you are losing out a major portion of your income. This makes optimizing the revenue cycle management operations a priority for every single healthcare practice today.
Collection of the revenues in due time from the patients is one of the major reasons why the practices of today are losing out on their healthcare payments.
The Main Challenges in the Collection of Healthcare payments!
Healthcare payments are necessary for healthcare practices and other medical units. Such payments help the practices improve their cash flow health and manage the cash flow efficiently. Patient payments can be described as the single largest source of revenue for hospitals and healthcare practices. Therefore, such a source of revenue is important to help practices thrive and grow. In order to prevent the patient practices from losing out on the revenues, it is necessary that they understand the challenges that restrict or hamper patient payments, and take appropriate measures in eradicating them.
The main challenges that hamper the collection of healthcare payments can be listed as:
Delayed collection of payments
Most of the practices keep the patient payment windows right at the end or towards the end of their journeys. However, this procedure of placing the payments desk at the last has already prone to be troublesome for the healthcare practices, which complaint of losing out on their collections this way. After a tiresome patient journey, collections, which usually take time, become really exhausting for the patients. Moreover, the practices too, are often prone to slackening in this process that comes at the last of the patients' journeys, thereby increasing their propensity to lose their revenues.
Failure to review the patients' outstanding amounts
Reports highlight that over 42.9 million patients have outstanding medical bills. These outstanding bills and amounts, if not checked in full, shall ultimately be written off by practices as bad debts. These bad debts are increasing continually. As far as recent reports go, the bad debts have increased by $617 mn from 2015 to 2018, which has resulted in lifting the outstanding bad debts to more than $56.5 billion. Such bad debts, however, may be avoided by the fast and efficient medical software solutions from GrowPractice, which bring in a seamless, automatic billing process for the practices.
Inefficient medical staffs
Medical staffs commit mistakes and the medical workers who are not properly trained or are not smart or tech-savvy enough, or are not properly thorough with the billing processes due to the lack of experience or attention, are the reasons for major losses of practices. Besides, it is true that the number of medical workers is lessening in numbers. Around 18% of such healthcare workers have left their jobs since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. The only solution here for the practices is to hire smart workers, who are experienced and eager to learn and be well-versed with the upcoming technologies.
Incorrect billing
Around 80% of the medical bills and close to 50% of the medical claims are full of errors. These errors are mostly caused due to lack of attention and the manual methods of data entry and calculation that are involved in the billing and payments process. Such errors can easily be removed by the modern practices by installing cutting-edge practice management software that GrowPractices offers the practices. Such software solutions will solve these issues of incorrect or inaccurate billing and boost practice credibility and their revenues.
Lack of transparency of costs
Transparency of costs is something that every patient wants but only some practices strive to be transparent to their patients. Healthcare costs are ever-rising and are termed as quite unpredictable by over 70% of the patients. Besides, around 65% of the patients want transparency in the healthcare costs. Thus, practices need to be upfront when it comes to healthcare costs and make the patients aware of them even before they begin their treatment.
On the other hand, the lack of transparency will mark the practices as low in credibility and will lead patients to delay their payments. Moreover, exceeding costs quoted by the practices often leads to delayed payments, many of which become bad debts later on.
Some other challenges that the practices witness, which restrains their payment collections hugely are the lack of flexible payment plans. As per the statistics, it has been discovered that 35% of patients are worried about their ways for payments to pay for their recent hospital service. This makes them delay the payments because of the negligence of the providers, which often end up losing their revenues this way.
Proper documentation of the patients, their billings, medical history, and other data is needed but is often found lacking in many practices. Reports have it that around 77% of the providers have mentioned that it often takes more than a month to collect patient payments. Here, if the documentation is not proper, then the payment details and their outstanding amounts can easily be lost or hidden, thereby leading to losses in patient payment collections.
One of the primary steps that the practices can take in order to lessen their losses in terms of healthcare payments is collecting the payments from the patients in advance. Yes, payment collections from patients in advance can certainly minimize the practice woes at large by bringing in the crucial money in due time. Such a step has also been referred to time and again by experts while speaking on the easiest ways to improve revenue cycle management in modern healthcare practices.
Patient payment collections during patient check-ins and why is it useful?
Patient check-in is one of the primary steps that comes quite early in the patients' journey just before they start with their treatment. The check-in process involves the collection of the patient's crucial data and vitals and onboarding them for the treatment and the doctor visit after they show up at the practices.
The patient check-in process is placed after the booking of the patient appointments and patient intake, both of which stand crucial in the patients' journeys, and are being hugely focused on by the practices, which are boosting these processes with the implementation of cutting-edge medical software solutions brought by trustworthy providers like GrowPractice. The patient check-ins too are considered extremely important by the practices and are also engaging efficient patient management software to be bettered. Patient check-ins have also been discovered as one of such processes that can help in patient collections if the collection desk is merged with the same. This has proved to be greatly beneficial. Here's why more and more practices are opting to collect payments from patients during check-in:
Patient check-ins are becoming fast and secure
Modern-day patient check-ins are readily fast, secure, and effective. These check-ins are further fortified with the trustworthy practice management solutions by GrowPractice that helps practices and practice managers rest assured of the payment collections.
Collections in patient check-ins make advance collections possible
With the significant amount of loss that the practices are witnessing now, a majority of today's practices are counting on taking patient payments in advance. Patient payment collections during patient check-ins can be an effective step to make advance collections possible.
It leads to minimizing the healthcare payments losses
Healthcare payments or rather the lack of appropriate collections are piling in the losses for the healthcare practices. Effective patient pay services brought in by GrowPractice are mitigating all of the hassles in payment collections and helping practices improve their collections and revenues.
Patients are more inclined to pay at first go
Patients ultimately look to begin their treatments and if the check-in process includes the collection of patient payments, then they would have to pay before they move ahead with their treatment, which will help practices boost their patient payment collections.
GrowPractice patient pay services are healthcare payment solutions are changing the game for practices!
GrowPractice is one of the most efficient and trusted providers of medical office software solutions that providers improved healthcare payment solutions, which helps practice prevent followups and other hassles. GrowPractice has already increased patient collections by 20% and is gearing up to improve more practices. Along with efficient billing and payment collection facilities, GrowPractice also offers a range of other facilities via its medical software solutions like:
• Online patient appointments
• Paperless check-in and intakes
• Streamlined and customized patient workflow
• Secure and effective patient management services
• Fast and efficient patient payments
• Improved patient surveys and reviews
• Improved patient followups
