3 Questions with Piedmont Healthcare on Improving the Patient Financial Experience Through Tech

Allyson Bonner Keller, executive director of the patient connection center at Piedmont Healthcare, reflects on the use of technology to improve the patient experience and adhere to the No Surprises Act.

A poor patient financial experience can undermine an organization's reputation and the work it has put into providing the highest quality of care. A single poor registration or billing experience can negate a patients' positive, high-quality clinical experience at an organization. To avoid this, organizations must work hard to improve their patients’ overall financial experience.

Allyson Bonner Keller, FACHE, executive director of the patient connection center at Piedmont Healthcare, recently spoke at the HealthLeaders' Patient Financial Experience NOW Summit and discussed Piedmont Healthcare’s use of technology when it comes to improving the patient experience.  

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

HealthLeaders: What technology upgrades or additions have been in place at Piedmont Healthcare to help improve the patient financial experience?

Allyson Bonner Keller: At Piedmont Healthcare patients have the use of our patient portal through our EHR vendor. It's great because we are able to connect our EHR directly into an app that is specifically for our patients.

We try very hard to create a one stop shop for our patients. We want our patients to be able to go to one app, and not only be able to schedule appointments and access the care that they need, but also see an estimate for their services. Our patients are then able to use the app to pay any co-insurance or financial liability that they have.

We have also utilized several other tools along the way to enhance the patient journey in patient financial care. Most importantly, we've used a customer relationship management tool that allows us to have scripting in place and create dedicated workflows to really guide that patient experience.

HL: What industry triggers have helped drive this focus for Piedmont? 

Bonner Keller: One thing I think we can all agree on is that staffing has been a huge challenge due to the pandemic. We're all looking for how we can continue to improve our operations and be as efficient as possible without necessarily adding additional costs related to adding full-time employees.

But also, a big trigger has been the want for a digital front door. We have found that is what our patients are really looking for and it's what we've all become accustomed to, and again, I would say the pandemic only escalated this.

We've all become accustomed to having things right in front of us and available right from our phone and doing almost everything from that, so that’s really been a huge driver as well.

HL: How has the No Surprises Act affected Piedmont's need for technology when it comes to the patient financial experience?

Bonner Keller: A big component of our eligibility process and a big piece of the No Surprises Act is being able to identify an out of network plan to provide good faith estimates, so being able to utilize technology to do that has been huge for our organization.

We don't want to have someone from our revenue cycle staff have to pick up a phone, call an insurer, and then have to have a conversation with an insurance company to determine eligibility—all of that really needs to be built into whatever system you're using. In a perfect world, this would be built into the software you're using for that real-time eligibility. 

We need something like this, not only for out-of-network benefits, but for in network benefits too. When it comes to gathering this information for our patients, we're only as good as the information that the payers provide back to us for real-time eligibility. Streamlining this process will only enhance our compliance with the No Surprises Act.

As a large organization with multiple sites, we also have to start thinking about how we can connect those dots across providers that maybe aren’t sharing the same EHR system or the same billing system, so if we are going to provide a holistic estimation for a patient for their services, how can we get that information and connect it into one singular estimate?

None of us want to end up after the fact with bills that we didn’t expect to receive but we have a very complex healthcare system. All of that information is hard to get to, and everyone may not want to share that information either.

Those are the hurdles we have to work through and really find the technology solutions to do that.

Again, when it comes to gathering estimates to comply with the No Surprises Act, we can’t be trying to have all of these back-and-forth conversations with all of the providers that may be involved in a patient's care, especially when that could mean three, four, or five different providers that we would be reaching out to.

The other piece that I've been focused on at Piedmont is the pre-service world—so what happens prior to that patient’s arrival? How do we provide a good faith estimate in the form that a patient wants? 

Again, it's about the patient and what they want and how they can get it. All of our staff are remote now, so we can’t expect them to print out an estimate, put postage on it, and then stick it in the mail. We have to have technology solutions that help us actually get those notices out in other ways such as email or the patient portal.

But we also have to realize that there are still patients that don't have consistent internet or phone access, and not everyone is engaging in technology in the same way. Adapting our technology to improve the patient financial experience and fill these gaps and adhere to these new laws is important to us at Piedmont Healthcare and may be an ever-changing endeavor.