How Does a Practice Deal with All These High Deductible Plans?

The following is a guest post by Vishal Gandhi, CEO of ClinicSpectrum as part of the Cost Effective Healthcare Workflow Series of blog posts. Follow and engage with them on Twitter @ClinicSpectrum and @csvishal2222.

One of the biggest trends we’re seeing in healthcare today is a shift towards high deductible plans. This shift first started as more and more employers stopped offering insurance or cut the type of health insurance they offered. This started the trend towards individuals purchasing high deductible insurance plans.

While the shift to high deductible insurance plans started well before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the government mandated health insurance and associated health insurance exchanges (HIX) have thrown gas on the already flaming fire. What most patients didn’t realize when they signed up for insurance on the government’s HIX is that a large majority of the plans were high deductible insurance plans. This has led to a huge influx in high deductible plans entering medical offices.

What does this increase in high deductible plans mean?
This change is one of the most significant changes in healthcare reimbursement we’ve seen. High deductible plans mean a major shift in who will be paying the bill. Instead of collecting most of your money from insurance companies, your clinic will need to become expert at collecting money from patients as well. Yes, that’s right. You’re still going to have to collect from the insurance companies like before, but you’re going to have to build additional expertise around collecting payments from patients too.

While it’s true that clinics have been collecting payments from patients forever, that doesn’t mean that clinics have been doing a good job of actually collecting the money. In fact, I find practice after practice who hasn’t stayed on top of their patient collections. In the end, they often send their patient collections to a collections agency which frustrates the patients and tarnishes their name or they just write off the patient pay portion completely.

Suggestions to Improve Patient Collections
The first step to improving patient collections is to really understand the details of your patient’s insurance plan. This starts with doing an insurance eligibility check and verifying your patient’s plan details. We wrote about ways to streamline your insurance eligibility checks previously. Doing it right takes time, but with the right workflow automation solutions you can make sure that those working in your practice have the right insurance information. Once they have the right payment information, you’re much more likely to collect the payment from the patient while they’re standing in front of you at the office.

While collecting the patient payment from the patient while their in your office is ideal, there are dozens of reasons why this won’t happen. Some don’t have the money on them. Some walk out before you can collect. Etc etc etc. How then do you engage the patient in the payment process once they’ve left your office? In the past, the best solution was to send out bill after bill through the US postal service or possibly call the patient directly. This is an extremely time consuming and costly process that can take 60 to 90 days to obtain results.Plus, it costs several hours of man power and postage.

In the electronic world we live in, the first thing you can do to improve your patient collection process is to implement an online patient payment portal. This online payment process increases patient collections dramatically. The next generation patient is so unfamiliar with writing checks and sending snail mail, that those payments often get delayed. However, by offering the online patient payment option, you remove this barrier to payment.

The other way to improve patient collections is to use an automated messaging and collection process. This approach uses a collection of text, secure text, email, secure email and even smart phone notifications and automated calls in order to ensure the patient knows about their bill and has the opportunity to pay the bill. Plus, these customized decision rules provide a much more seamless and consistent approach to patient collections.

Conclusion
This movement to the empowered patient with a high deductible insurance plan is not likely to go away. Employers are happily getting out of the health insurance business and many want patients to have more responsibility over the healthcare they receive. Being sure that you have a well thought out patient collection workflow is going to be critical to the ongoing success of any medical practice.

The Cost Effective Healthcare Workflow Series of blog posts is sponsored by ClinicSpectrum, a leading provider of workflow automation solutions for healthcare. Their Invoice Spectrum and Auto Collect Spectrum products are a great way to handle the increase in high deductible plans that are entering medical offices.