While paper is still a trusted customer communication channel, increasing the efficiency and speed of the revenue cycle is a top priority that needs to take place wherever the healthcare consumer happens to be – on email, phone, tablet or PC.
In today’s environment, critical communications like “explanation of benefits” or EOBs don’t just represent an outbound communication with your customer. It is important to consider the inbound aspect of that communication, particularly as it requires customer response to keep the revenue cycle moving along.
How you populate and deliver the contents of your documents are equally critical factors in getting patients to pay their bills — and making that experience as personalized as possible will improve the chances even more. Additionally, adopting a multichannel approach to healthcare communications has become increasingly necessary. People don’t just react to their EOB, they want to interact with it, and through a variety of channels that are often used concurrently (as often consumers will be on their phone and their tablet at the same time, or looking at their printed statement while they are in their emailed document). Combining the printed EOB with electronic payment options, such as having a QR code on the EOB for online bill payment, speeds up the remittance process.
When it comes to acquiring revenue through the all-important EOB, how this document is formatted can also make a big difference in the remittance process. When a patient disputes a line item on their bill, often all the other line items are left unpaid while the charge is disputed. This slows down the revenue cycle tremendously. Separating out costs on the EOB provides a clear path for patients to pay the charges they agree with, even while disputing some of them.
For patients who are more visually-focused, the need for personalized clickable charts, graphs or other graphical representations of their healthcare information that allow patients to drill down to a granular level of detail, might be all it takes to help them understand their charges and pay their bill. Organic understanding without a call to the contact center saves money not only in terms of cost per call, but also in terms of reduced customer frustration and its subsequent fallout.
Providing patients with the opportunity to interact with the communications you deliver through their method and channel of choice, assuming it meets compliance, will help achieve optimal revenue cycle management operations.
