Encouraging Payment Upfront from Your Patients
New trends in healthcare have deemed self-pay the third largest payer behind Medicare and Medicaid. This large shift to patients being responsible for a third of their medical expenses leaves your practice jumping new hurdles – collecting payments, decreasing bad debt and reducing patient liability.1
With rising deductibles and high copays, it has become incumbent on the provider/medical practice to collect what is owed to them, but with your patient now being your third largest payer how do you educate and encourage payment up front?
Give your patients transparency
The new best practice patient payment model depends on proactive communication and education while also encouraging payment. Patient cost estimation is an especially critical component because it lays the groundwork for key points of communication.
Patients typically are not aware of their deductible and maximum out-of-pocket spending. An accurate patient cost estimation helps patients understand what they owe and when they’re expected to pay. This leads to the discussion of payment of what’s owed and the options available for payment including online bill pay, card on file and scheduled payment plans.
Leap over those hurdles and get paid faster
Patient cost estimation tools can help you leap over those hurdles by providing an accurate, timely cost estimation that facilitates a better patient experience, allows you to secure payment in advance, and minimizes collections efforts.
With the EdiInsight Patient Cost Estimation solution* your patients receive that much appreciated transparency into the cost of a prospective procedure, but also gives you the advantage when it comes to getting paid, faster.
Provide your patients with accurate and timely billing information through data collected by Practice Insight including eligibility information, ERAs, and how much you’ve been compensated for a procedure overtime.
This flexible tool allows easy workflow adaptation with a simple three step process which produces an accurate, professional looking patient cost estimation.
An estimate in advance makes medical costs easier to swallow and collect, not to mention it helps your practice tighten up your Revenue Cycle Management process by…
Easily generating the most accurate patient cost estimations
Collecting a percentage of the procedure costs upfront
Improving your patient’s experience with advanced notice of high procedure costs
Reducing the number of A/R days, statements and bad debt collections
If you’re already utilizing Practice Insight as your preferred clearinghouse with MicroMD solutions, this tool might be a great addition to your practice.
Interested in more information? Reach out to John Webb, MicroMD Client Insights Manager. He will be happy to answer any questions you have regarding implementing a patient cost estimation tool in your practice.
*MicroMD users will need to have Practice Insight’s EDIinsight® Eligibility services to access the Patient Cost Estimation tool
1Fortune-telling in revenue cycle management: Patient personas and propensities to pay, 2016
