There’s no shortage of patients, but getting them to pay the medical bills they accrue can be a challenge. Traditional methods of sending patients to collections or merely mailing a bill don’t always yield the results we seek. However, working with your patients instead of against them will positively impact your average medical billing collection rates.
How to Optimize Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is an easy way to improve average medical billing collection rates. Customer engagement refers to the connection and relationship between the provider and the customer, which in a medical setting is the patient. This could include communication at the point of care, interactions through online portals, text messages, and more.
Customer Engagement Services
If you aren’t sure how engaging your practice is to customers, you could benefit from various customer engagement services. By implementing some or all of these customer engagement services, you can better address your customer’s needs and create a strategy to improve average medical billing collection rates.
Understand Your Customers
As a provider, you likely know your patients, but do you understand them as a customer? Ultimately, healthcare is transactional, and the patient is a type of customer. Better understanding your customers will result in a better experience for them. A better customer experience will yield higher payment percentages.
Customer Journey Mapping
Understanding your customer’s unique journeys can help you better understand the types of patients you’re attracting (those who are likely to pay versus those who aren’t, for example). Additionally, by fully mapping out the types of customers or patients you see, you can locate opportunities for improvement and identify pain points that need to be remedied.
VoC Programs
VoC or Voice of Customer programs are one way you can better understand your customers. These programs help you collect and obtain meaningful information about your customers. You can use insights from the VoC program to know who your customers are and how they think.
Strategies for Personalization
Implementing different personalization strategies is a great way to tailor interactions so that they are unique to your practice. Don’t make your patients feel like they’re a number. Make them feel seen, and allow your interactions to be personal yet professional. Companies like ours can help you create personal engagement strategies that improve relations and bill-pay rates.
Omnichannel Integration
Portals, emails, text messaging, your website, and even mail programs are all “channels” of communication that can all be integrated or connected! Leverage the technology you have available and give your customers opportunities to connect. Omnichannel integration makes it easy for customers to find you and connect, promoting engagement. This in turn results in higher average medical billing collection rates.
Employee Training
Your employees are as memorable to your patients as their experience with you. A nasty or discourteous office staff can turn away patients quickly—and make them reluctant to pay any bills that come their way. Not every employee comes equipped with soft skills. Train your employees to interact with your patients in a manner that is personable, engaging, and beneficial to your practice.
Using Engagement to Collect Revenue
Friendly engagement can help establish a connection where your patient doesn’t see the relationship as merely transactional. Patients will feel more responsible for their bills when they connect with their providers and staff. Provide multiple opportunities through meaningful engagement to increase your practice’s average medical billing collection rates.
Point of Care
By making it a practice to collect payment at the point of care, patients will know that payment is expected before they make their appointment. Be clear about this policy and include it on your website and in any text messaging reminders to let patients know your expectations.
Customer engagement regarding payment doesn’t have to be pushy, but it should be clear. Patients who pay for services at the time of care are more likely to pay than those who aren’t required.
Make it Easy with Omnichannel Opportunities
Customer engagement means connecting with your customers—so make it easy to connect! With text message subscriptions, online patient portals, and email communication now prevalent methods of engagement, you can stay connected with your patients with omnichannel integration.
Staying connected will keep your practice—and the bill— at the forefront of the patient’s mind. Allowing for online bill payment at the same place where patients receive test results or other updates regarding their care will be less of a hassle for patients because they only have one login to remember.
Offer Options Before Collections
When you engage patients, you may learn valid reasons why they have not paid their bills. Past-due patients may not know that they can pay their bill in payments.
They may be in a situation where they merely need to contact their insurance provider to get their benefits straightened out. Engage customers and provide options before sending them to collections.
Overall Impact to Revenue
When customer engagement and their overall experience including ease of bill payment are improved, providers can expect to see a positive impact on their average medical billing collection rates. Ultimately, these bills are not really all that different from the bills of other services, but it’s how these providers interact with those patients that is different. That difference is what results in fewer bills paid.
Customers want to be respected, which includes respecting their time. They want to be able to pay their bills easily and digitally. In today’s world, they demand a better billing experience. If you can provide that to your patients, you will see your past due bills decline, average medical billing collection rates improve, and you will have happier patients. All of this means a happier, healthier practice and more revenue.
Find Out How Your Facility Can Improve Average Medical Billing Collection Rates
Schedule a meeting with us to learn how you can improve average medical billing collection rates at your practice. We would be happy to partner with you to find a strategy that you can use now and in the future. Simply contact us today!
