3 Things Patients Want From Their Healthcare Financial Experience
At HITconsultant.net there is an visionary article about customer service in the healthcare sector by Joe Polaris, the Senior VP of Product and Technology at R1 RCM.
He opens by drawing an intriguing comparison with booking airline tickets:
To book an airline flight, for example, consumers simply open up an app or a website. At their convenience — any time of day or night — they select flights, choose seats, review costs and make payments. They check in from mobile phones or kiosks and use the same self-service technology to print their boarding passes. Airlines decided to reinvent their consumer experience and revenue collection, and started by mapping out the current process, then the desired processes and identifying where automation technology should be deployed to enable speed, scale, and quality improvements. Now airlines no longer need vast numbers of fully staffed desks at every airport. Instead, they leverage digital self-service to please customers, increase efficiencies and lower operating costs simultaneously.
By contrast, patients who want to schedule a doctor’s appointment usually have to call and speak with a staff member, then talk with someone else to check in for the visit. They leave without knowing how much they owe; in fact, they don’t receive a bill until weeks or months later. The entire process is labor-intensive, opaque and dependent on staff and resource availability — but why?
As someone who just paid $1500 for a one way ticket because the online airline booking system lost my reservation, I can say there is still room for improvement in our new digital world. However, in the “outdated healthcare experience,” patients want quick and easy access to medical prices and information and better ways to manage around the often stiff co-pays of insurance policies. Frankly put, many healthcare providers are coming up short on the overall customer experience.
Definitive Healthcare’s 2019 Annual Healthcare Trends Survey backs up this premise identifying healthcare consumerism and patient empowerment as top healthcare industry trends.
With this in mind: What are the three things patients want from their healthcare financial experience, according to Joe Polaris?
- Accessibility
- Speed
- Quality
If it sounds we need to reinvent the customer experience, that’s because we do!
Streamlining and automating payments and remits from the insurance companies provides critical data which support this goal. OrboAccess technologies can convert and post a paper or PDF-originated remittance and payment in a day’s time; which helps enrich the healthcare patient payment experience. Have other ideas to enrich the insurance payment experience? Send them to marketing@orbograph.com.
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