From Appointments to Bills: Using Rev Cycle Tech to Ease Patient Burnout

In an industry inundated with technology, how can it be used to counter patient burnout in the revenue cycle and beyond?

When revenue cycle leaders look to ease financial burdens for their organization, there is one area that can’t be overlooked: the patients.

From the patient financial experience to the clinical experience, keeping patients happy and avoiding burnout is necessary for a thriving organization. Not only can burnout negatively impact patient experience and the quality of care they receive, patient burnout can also lead to decreased patient volume and revenue for healthcare organizations.

When it comes to technology, what can be done to remedy the patient experience and avoid burnout and lost revenue?

Sidd Shah, vice president for product and business growth at Healow Health and former program lead for the New York City Health Department’s Primary Care Information Project, has seen the burnout problem up close, and recently shared his thoughts with our sister publication Part B News on how to counter patient burnout through tech and more.

Patient burnout, Shah said, isn’t just caused by the patient’s experiences at the organization; it could grow from related extrinsic anxieties, such as economic factors that the patient may relate to their ability to access care. “Or it could be about just finding the right physician opinion,” Shah said, “or taking too long to find an appointment, or the provider not being empathetic about the patient not being able to pay their medical bills.”

Expectedly, Shah suggests a role for technical solutions—for example, a “direct booking” solution for scheduling. This would prevent the confusion of competing appointment streams, he said, where “you as a consumer go to something-dot-com or to your app, and when you book you're not looking at the same schedule as the provider, and some other patient might be on the phone or on another site booking an appointment.”

Shah is also a fan of patient self-check-in: “It instills a sense of control and removes [the] paper process of filling [out] forms,” he says. It also “gives providers more time to spend with patients vs. on systems and data entry.”

Timely messaging to the patients on the day of or day prior to a pre-scheduled appointment is another way to enhance the patient experience, Shah said. “Televisits between in-person visits if schedules are heavily booked [so] patients are not waiting too long to be seen” is also a way to use tech to ease stress that can lead to patient burnout, Shah said.

Read more from this story here.