Perfecting the Patient Billing Experience in 2023

Revenue cycle leaders say helping patients navigate the billing process is essential in creating a positive patient financial experience.

How patients are billed plays a large role in the overall patient financial experience and satisfaction. Because of this, revenue cycle leaders said that helping patients navigate the billing process is essential in creating a positive patient financial experience, especially considering the No Surprises Act.

Paper statements work, but the digital age has pushed organizations into not only wanting to add in that digital billing experience, but they are needing to. Patients are now expecting both digital and automated options when it comes time to pay their bill.

When first taking that step toward a digital billing experience, patient education is once again vital to success. Organizations can offer the most sophisticated bill-pay technology, but what use is technology if a patient doesn’t know how to use it?

Three prominent revenue cycle leaders addressed this conundrum during our recent revenue cycle roundtable in Nashville, TN. They discussed why it’s imperative to improve the patient billing experience and examined the benefits of patient education in light of the No Surprises Act.

Read on to learn what they had to say.

Savanah Arceneaux, Director of Patient Financial Services, Ochsner Health: “In terms of the legislation that's being implemented with pricing transparency and surprise billing, it's important to get the patients involved in their patient financial journey. Ensuring that they understand what they're seeing when they get a bill and knowing what questions to ask is important. And even helping them anticipate what that bill might look like before they get it allows them to understand their benefits ahead of time.

At Ochsner we proactively provide estimates to our patients prior to being seen and this helps them understand the differences between the charges, contractual allowances, and their patient responsibility.”

Mary Wickersham, Vice President-Patient Financial Services, Avera Health: “From a market share standpoint, patients—depending on their insurance— they can choose to go to a competitor and if they have a bad financial experience, they may go across town to the competitor, because they feel like there's more focus on the billing experience than there used to be. There's a lot more scrutiny because of price transparency and people want to challenge everything, which is good, but I think there's just been that shift and the light is shining more on the financial side.

We have outside providers that come in and treat patients. The anesthesia group that we have, it's not Avera. But they're putting people to sleep in our hospital, and they don't understand that they're not Avera, so they get a separate bill from them and that doesn’t make sense.

But with the No Surprises Act, we're going to have to put their charges on our estimate, so the patient has that full picture—how are we going to figure all that out?”

Mary Neal, Assistant VP of Revenue Cycle, Ochsner Health: “Not every patient has the financial literacy or literacy in general to grasp even the most simple concepts sometimes, so that can make it harder on us to educate.

I think when you're speaking about the consumer experience in general, even taking healthcare out of it, we don't dissect the different pieces and parts and say, ‘Well, the care was great, but the billing part was just okay.’ You're evaluating that product or service as a whole.

If the financial piece is not where it needs to be, one could only assume this is representative of the level of quality of everything else that you're going to get.”

Wickersham: “There's an overarching misunderstanding in every community, they look at our charges and they're like, ‘Why are they so high? How can the hospital not be making money?’ There's this thing called contractuals. It's like there needs to be some big news special explaining healthcare, charges, contractuals, payer contracts, because people don't get that, and I wouldn’t understand it either unless I worked in it.”

Neal: “As much as we try to automate to lower the cost, the automation is only as good as the people who build it and validate it regularly.

It's difficult when you're trying to explain to a patient that maybe there was an error on their bill because not every single claim gets a human looking at it for accuracy before it goes out the door.

There's good, legitimate reasoning behind that, but patients don’t want to hear, ‘oh, this is wrong because it just ran through the machine, and this is what bill we sent you.’"