Everyone Wins When Vendors and Clients Communicate

While improving the patient financial experience and thus getting more payments is naturally a result of using the PatientPay solution, truly partnering with our clients so they can achieve their goals is critical. This means consistent communication, pushing for feedback, understanding their workflows and challenges, leveraging data and analytics, then marrying all of it to best practices in order to make the PatientPay solution more valuable to our current and future users. Specialty groups, like Physical Therapy, have specific needs given their high recurrence of services for a single patient. Upcoming enhancements to PatientPay will address these needs. They talk. We listen.

Our PT partners recently brought to us an interesting operational challenge at the point of intake (front desk). It is difficult to manage wait times and patient satisfaction when you are having to repeat the same conversation and information exchange, manually enter data, fumble with cards through hardware devices, and explain different financial policies every time they walk in. Our partners needed a way to make the payment aspects, including specialized financial plans, align with treatments plans and become generally more efficient.? So we took two steps to making their life much easier which also helps avoid backend challenges and raises collection rates.

First, card-on-file for time-of-service payments. It’s not complicated. But you need to make sure your solution partner understands security and compliance. We do and now it’s much easier for both the patients and office staff to get through intake quickly, increasing patient satisfaction and giving the provider the opportunity to service more patients. ??

Next, what if the clinic or facility could schedule recurring payments at time of registration? These types of models have different names and from what we’ve learned from our clients, they’re derived from different policies and programs. Our plan is to be flexible to accommodate those evolving needs. Some shared a need to take a set payment amount for a specific period of time. Some a set amount with no official end. Some a different amount for a contracted period of time (think auto-payments like your utility bills). When services are recurring, like physical therapy, behavioral health, mental health, long-term care, or skilled nursing, this model allows for convenience for the patient and a better financial outcome for the provider.

We are constantly looking for ways to simplify our users’ experience, improve our partners’ processes and ultimately reduce costs while increasing collections. We can’t do it without input and like any great partnership, strong communication and a willingness to improve are helping PatientPay, our clients, patients and the market win. And we’re so confident in our results…we’ll guarantee it!