Financially Engage Your Patients to Facilitate Higher Collections and Improve Patient Satisfaction

Many hospitals are implementing patient engagement strategies to help improve care outcomes. This is going to be an important trend as we enter a new era of reimbursement. Just like engaging patients can improve care outcomes, engaging financially with patients can also yield significant benefits for patients and providers.

Financial patient engagement includes educating and communicating with patients at every point in the revenue cycle – pre-service, point of service and post-service – to facilitate higher collections and help improve patient satisfaction. I recently came across a whitepaper by RelayHealth that looks at a number of ways you can engage with patients financially to achieve these results.

At a high level the whitepaper offers a couple suggestions:

  • Educate – Train staff to increase opportunities to collect
  • Inform – Arm your patients with the information they need to pay bills sooner
  • Collect – Provide multiple touch points and payment options to help reduce staff workload and increase collections
  • Measure – Leverage data to help improve processes and achieve goals

These are all really good suggestions for hospitals looking to improve their financial position. If you download the whitepaper, it goes into more detail on each of the subjects. Many of the explanations come from a RelayHealth product perspective, but the concepts can be applied regardless of the software you use.

For some reason we often shy away from talking about the finances of healthcare. We’re a little uncomfortable talking about what’s really happening and what an organization can do to be more successful on the financial side of things. Hopefully I can start more conversations about the financials of healthcare going forward.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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