In today’s healthcare landscape, patient care is no longer the only expectation providers must meet. The focus has shifted towards providing an exceptional patient experience that starts from the first appointment and extends to the billing process. This new healthcare currency has prioritized patient engagement, resulting in providers mapping out an excellent patient journey.
“75% of Patients Look at Price Transparency Ahead of Care Access”
Therefore, it's clear that the growth of a practice entirely depends on the ease of a patient's journey. This blog emphasizes the importance of understanding patient journeys and how mapping them can be key to growing your practice with AnodynePay solutions.
What is a Patient Journey?
Providing your patients with an efficient and memorable experience is the cusp of a patient's journey. Nowadays, patients don't just need a prescription for their medicine; they need a complete experience worth their time. Patients expect meaningful interactions with healthcare providers that leave them satisfied after their appointment rather than uneasy. Hospital visits are often stressful and expensive, but the appointment, billing, and interaction process are something that providers can control. This means delivering an excellent patient experience with financial transparency that enhances the patient's journey.
Why is the Patient Journey Important?
“A Patient’s journey is directly proportional to the growth of a practice.”
The financial pressure upon a Healthcare business to do better for the practice and patients is immense. The compliance measures are overwhelming, and the revenue outcomes fall beyond the variables of the practice, as they rest in the hands of the patient. Practice can always deliver excellent care throughout the process; however, the rest of the outward billing procedure and after stages of the process are variable outcomes that are not in the provider's control.
One such example is the financial transparency of a practice- Payment plans for the patient must be flexible with the due time of weekly, bi-weekly, monthly plans, etc. Patients must be able to opt for various payment options such as Autopay, QuickPay, and credit cards. Creating a flexible payment priority system is the one-stop solution for improving a patient's journey.
Challenges in the Healthcare Landscape
90% of Healthcare leaders have named patient care their number one priority for 2023, and it is well-known that good experience leads to better collections. However, many steadfast challenges stand in mapping an excellent patient journey.
- Due to the extreme costs of patient engagement software, with the implementation of long-term maintenance, many businesses tend to refrain from investing in this software, leading to a severe communication gap and potential loss of leads.
- Revenue Cycle Management remains the top struggle for providers as the patient collection depends on the patients. However, 42% of healthcare providers still use paper statements, creating a tedious process for the entire organization to speed up the patient collection process.
- Price transparency is a common issue for patients, which could derail their experience and urge them to continue their journey elsewhere. Providers stick to the traditional process of processing payments by the desk, with limited payment options.
- On days of extreme footfall in hospitals, patients can have an unpleasant experience while waiting to make their payments and no online options, and staff would have a tough time due to the tedious process of desk payments.
- Healthcare businesses need to keep up with technological advancements to improve their business operations and reach out to more potential leads. Patient engagement tools can be highly effective, offering engagement tactics like text reminders and IVR calls. However, selecting easy-to-use and affordable software can be a challenge.
A patient's payment experience directly impacts a business' clinical outcomes, thus impacting profitability.
Strategies to Map The Perfect Patient Journey
Today's patients feel empowered to take control of their healthcare journeys and have high expectations for the care they receive. The care also depends upon the patient's payment plans and options one can provide the patient to relieve unnecessary stress, which adds to the process of visiting a Healthcare.
- Create a Patient-Centric Experience
The patient-centric experience starts for a Healthcare business when they view the patient as a consumer rather than a lead opportunity. It is important to make the patient aware of their choice while providing a clear vision of their experience, treatments, symptoms, and financial obligations. These financial obligations include creating a flexible patient payment plan where the provider can also receive quick payments with updated technology of patient portals and E-statements.
- Establish patient Personas
There is one path to deliver excellent patient care, while there's another method of delivering personalized patient care to the right target audience. You must collect patient data and engagement preferences to provide a personalized experience. These preferences are possible via data collection via patient portals, where patients have complete transparency regarding their data and inputs. The patient portal also has complete financial transparency where patients can check their payments, dates, due balance, next payment, and a detailed invoice for all their treatments.
- Engage the Patients
Patient Engagement is a vital part of the patient experience. From the first time a patient calls a provider for an appointment or confirmation, the provider must start interacting with the patient. These engagement tactics include text reminders, IVR calls, emails, etc. These emails or texts can be a continuous form of communication for the patients regarding their appointments, treatments, reminders, bills, payment options, provider updates, etc.
- Improve Patient Flow with Data & Insights
Healthcare organizations can implement a unified and personalized experience where patients can receive the right message and services on their preferred platform at the right time. Through a portal, a provider can access a patient's 360 view from their first appointment to their last transaction and forge the care gaps, thus enriching the patient's journey. With each update, healthcare organizations can identify and proactively attempt to prevent any cash flow gaps that may hinder patient care. You can learn how much your actual patient responsibility is for weekly revenue after all patient payments.
- Measure Your ROI
Patient Journey requires engagement tactics to improve the experience; hence, one should always measure their metrics. Your practice can calculate its ROI by evaluating patient feedback and surveys for feedback. When you utilize the data from these platforms and measure the before-aftereffects of using patient engagement software, their rating will estimate your ROI. With flexible patient payment plans, your practice is well on its way to creating a profitable front.
Benefits of Crafting an Exceptional Patient Journey
A patient journey does not start from the search process and ends at the billing junction alone. Various engagement touch points throughout the journey enhance the patient's experience.
- Personalized Patient Experience- Healthcare marketing is similar to retail regarding consumer experience. Patients nowadays look forward to value-based care rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Once patients complete one step of their payment plan, they get an idea about their further costs and adjust their plan according to the payment plans provided by the practice. Providers can also generate custom E-statements for patients instead of mailing paper statements and save time and costs with easy online statements.
- Better Communication- Communication is key and especially important for a good patient-provider relationship. With patient text reminders and calls, it is easy for patients to reach out to providers and solve their queries immediately. With continuous communication, you can identify gaps around the patient's experience and improve the communication standards, thus boosting your organization.
- Better Patient Collection- A company's profitability depends on the patient payment experience and the seamless patient journey. It is only natural that a patient would continue their relationship with a provider when they receive excellent care and financial transparency. Hence, flexible and personalized patient pay services are deciding factors for a practice's growth with long-term patients.
How to Enhance Your Practice’s Growth with AnodynePay
AnodynePay is a leading patient engagement platform that provides the complete solution for mapping an excellent patient journey while increasing your practice's revenue collection.
- Billing & Collection- Managing patient billing and collections can be challenging, especially without a systematic approach. AnodynePay offers a simple and optimized way to collect revenue and ensure a steady cash flow by managing patient balance collections. Unlike traditional payment methods, all it takes is a click for the provider to get their payment immediately in their bank, with absolutely no time.
- Patient 360 Analytics- AnodynePay Patient 360 Analytics helps providers receive a 360 view of a patient's health status, financial history, and other relevant information gathered from multiple sources to enrich a patient throughout their care journey. All these insights help your practice form an informed opinion about each personalized journey and approach them further for a better experience.
- Patient E-statements- Providers' main issue is paper statements cost, and these statements can also be a hassle where there are no definite contact details. Still, with AnodynePay, practices can reduce almost 2/3rd of the cost by E-statements, and patients can use cards and make payments. E-statements are generated online with no costs and get received by your patients on their phones with no hassle.
- Text Reminders & Calls- Save your staff time to work on addressing patient questions rather than calling and leaving voicemails. Utilize Text reminder & IVR call to initiate patient conversations and get paid faster. These tools increase your patient engagement and propel them to provide better interactions.
- Practice Portal- AnodynePay practice portal is an innovative cloud-based practice management system that provides a single base for all centralized communication and easy access to patient information.
- Patient Portal- AnodynePay's Patient Portal provides a secure and convenient platform to access all medical billing information and payment options online. The portal provides complete transparency for them to access their files anytime, anywhere.
- Multiple Patient Pay Options- Patient payment options are a multitude with AnodynePay. With online payments, cards, Autopay options for recurring pay, auto-debit, QuickPay for direct payments, and saving your card in your portal, AnodynePay has all the facilities available on one platform. Practices even have the option to run the VCC (Virtual Credit card) from insurance within the Anodyne platform.
Bottom Line
The force of technological advancements via engagement platforms such as AnodynePay certainly provides a ladder for Healthcare practices to improve their bottom line. It all boils down to the quality of your patient payment experience. With flexible patient payment options and provider assets of cost-reducing E-statements and online options, your practice becomes more rewarding – and helps you generate a healthier bottom line and make you more appealing to newer patients and health plans.
