What our Patient Payment Services Customers Are Saying
Download Case Study PDF
What improvements have you seen since using POS’s account balance notifications?
In the first month we collected an additional $29,257 strictly from patients who received the reminder calls.
You implemented a series of statements with POS (1st statement, past due, final notice). POS customers who use this sequencing typically find they send 40% less final notices to patients. In just six months, you dropped from an average of 7,500 to 4,500 statements. Can you elaborate?
I initially implemented our statements with a larger amount of time to make payments or payment plans while we worked to clean up our A/R. Our system is set to drop patients at 151+ days to our in-house collections, which is when we start sending reminder calls through POS. We customized the look of our statement and added the website URL to promote online payments. If we can get more patients using e-statements, I would expect we would shorten the timeframe for our statements. Three years ago our outstanding A/R was around $3,000,000. After implementing the POS best practices our outstanding A/R is around $1,000,000.
What else have you implemented to cut down on the number of statements patients are receiving?
Despite the numbers we have actually decreased the dollar limit amount for statements from $35 to $15, adding more statements than before. The most successful time to collect from patients is at time of service. Our Revenue Cycle team has put together some great reports and dashboards to monitor the collections for improvement. In addition, a few years ago we revamped our sliding fee schedule and implemented flat fees; this helps patients be more prepared for payment at the front desk.
Do you get a lot of payments online? What are you doing to increase online payments? Do you have any statistics you could share?
Online Bill Pay is the most important service for both staff and patients. The time savings and efficiency is priceless! We couldn’t live without this function! It has been a process of educating our patients that this service is available. We promote online bill pay every time they call in to make payments. Our marketing department has helped a lot with flyers and education at the front desk and “on hold” messages. We have a small amount of patients that take advantage of the payment plan options, which is also a huge time saver. The patients love the “somewhat” personal email they receive from me just before their auto-payment is made. This saves a total of about 5-10 minutes per payment, not to mention that I can now balance my credit card payments at the end of each month in minutes instead of hours!