How Text-to-Pay Services Can Improve Your Revenue Cycle

August 22, 2023
Improve your revenue cycle
“Communication is Key- the main factor to maximizing your business’s revenue.”

How often have we all heard the saying “Communication is Key”? Maintaining a good patient-practice relationship is a fundamental aspect emphasized throughout the medical field. A provider’s communication and billing approach is directly related to the patient’s happiness, loyalty, and improvement in revenue cycle management.

After the covid-19 pandemic, there was a complete shift in healthcare treatment and ways to receive patient payment as the world was hit with a touch of taboo. Telehealth treatments got a significant boost, as did the acceptance of online payments. A recent survey shows 62% of respondents prefer to pay via an online patient portal. Research says that this shift in the healthcare sector will stay, and patients will look for better online payment options and communication mediums from healthcare providers.

Practices are yet to adapt to these online practices due to a lack of trust, payment delays, transparency complications, and more. However, today’s blog highlights the importance of Text-To-Pay services and how vital it is to improve your Revenue Cycle Management.

Is your Business losing out on potential revenue?

Texting is a popular phenomenon worldwide, with every third person accessing a mobile for calls and texts. However, Healthcare businesses curve backward in these advancements as many continue using carrier mail services to bill their patient statements.

The concept of mailing the patients their bills offline needs to be updated, as they are time-consuming and leads to delayed statements, where the patients need clarification about their debts owed. Providers must also consider expanding their digital communication channels, with the preference for printed statements decreasing from 36% to 31%.

Almost half of all healthcare businesses are not appropriately addressing patient communication preferences, presenting a growing opportunity to improve the patient’s financial experience simply by interacting more directly with their patients. 59% of Patients prefer Text Message Billing Notifications; this is an open-door opportunity for Healthcare businesses to improve their Revenue cycle with patient interaction.

How Can Text-To-Pay Improve Revenue Cycle Management?

Text-to-pay is a billing service that works with text messages. Its primary function is to enable patients to receive billing status notifications via text message on their smartphones. It allows consumers to pay their bills with a few touches. The response is instant compared to emails, phone conversations, and paper invoices. Texting outperforms all other mediums.

Text-to-pay also allows for connection and interaction with customers by fostering trust. It secures and expedites payments by tightening revenue cycle management from beginning to end. Healthcare providers employing the text-to-pay function have higher chances of receiving patient payments on time. The text-to-pay service is the new mandatory service that healthcare practices need to collect on-time patient payments and improve their revenue cycle.

Key Advantages of Text-To-pay Services

The ability to complete one’s payments within a click through Text-To-Pay services eliminates all the difficulties a traditional Healthcare Billing system deals with. These services can strengthen a Healthcare’s bottom line with these advantages.

  • Upgrading to the latest billing technology is not required.
  • No need to embed new software to collect patient payments faster.
  • Zero effort or cost from the customer.
Benefits of Text-To-Pay Services
  1. Immediate Reminders and Alerts
    Research says that 51% of customers prefer a text message reminder as it would prompt them to pay their bills faster.
    Text-to-pay is the best option for improving the revenue cycle, as patients regularly check their text messages. Texts are faster and more immediate. Patient reminders via texts are more convenient than regular emails or phone calls. Texts also reduce the work for providers of sending long bulk emails left unread for days
  2. Easy Communication
    If the healthcare provider sends paper-based statements or electronic mail, the patient might miss the emails in the heap of unnecessary emails or misplace the papers. Healthcare providers must also spend time on statement generation and send it again. With text-to-pay, patients can view their bills on their phones and call the provider in case of doubts or queries. Simple text resolves payment quickly and creates interactions with quick responses and fewer complications and improves the revenue cycle.
  3. Less Paperwork
    Printing and mailing patient statements are expensive, generating lots of paper that might be hard to recycle. Healthcare providers can be active members in delivering solutions to conserve the environment. Patients are looking for frequency and consistency of communication from their providers, which has increased in importance from 31% in 2022 to 39% in 2023. These reminders would prompt them to pay their bill faster, and if a patient’s preference is pushing them to pay the bills in full and faster, it is only fair for businesses to adopt this preference to improve their revenue cycle.
  4. Faster Collections
    Patients can pay their bills or communicate with their providers using text-to-pay features with simple clicks on their cell phones. The response rate of text is higher than email as the patients spend most of their time on cell phones. Rather than using the traditional methods that demand ample time, effort, numerous rounds of questions and answers, payment delays, and errors, use text-to-pay, which is more reliable and can improve the business revenue cycle.
  5. To Text Your Patients Now with Text-To-Pay Services
  6. Save Staff Time
    Due to automated text reminders, practices can take a break from continually calling patients and adopt more productive practices instead. With these scheduled text reminders, the cost-effective factor also helps practices improve their revenue cycle.
  7. Reduce Cancellations
    Every year missed appointments cost the United States healthcare system billions of dollars. A missed appointment implies that a patient is not only not receiving the care they require but also results in a lost billing opportunity and staffing expenditures not offset by billable services.Cancellations, no-shows, and no-goes get reduced when patients are reminded of their appointments, improving the revenue cycle. Healthcare organizations might message patients before an appointment to remind them of their scheduled treatment.
  8. Patient Recall
    A healthcare organization is a business and needs to create awareness among patients to remember their organization so they can frequently care for their health. These patients are already familiar with the provider organization, have traveled there, and hopefully have had a favorable care experience. Hence, if patients have previously sought these services, they likely understand and value the value of preventative care. These features suggest that a provider organization and its employees should exert little effort to entice these patients to return for these treatments.

How to measure your increase in revenue?

After implementing a text-to-pay program, measuring and tracking results is critical to assess the improvement in the revenue cycle.

Testimonial
  • Review regular reports and analytics on SMS engagement and related payment outcomes concerning a previously defined baseline with your vendor partner.
  • Keep track of all patient interactions and follow up through their preferred platforms.
  • Practices can utilize Marketing efforts and customized segmentation lists to inform patients about new payment tools.

Scaling a text-to-pay program necessitates coordinated efforts at all levels of patient interaction to advise patients of their alternatives and guarantee that they choose their chosen way of payment. Text-to-pay makes patients convenient and easy to pay anytime, anywhere. Patients won’t be able to give excuses to delay monthly money and have peace of mind that they have fewer items on their to-do lists, and practices can improve their revenue cycle.

How to Choose the Right Solution for Increase text-to-pay revenue

While Revenue Cycle Management is the main aim of implementing text-to-pay services, patient-centric features are the must-have feature to look forward to with engagement solutions.

AnodynePay offers several patient engagement solutions that provide self-check-in portals where patients can log in and keep track of all their health records, visits, conversations, etc. AnodynePay’s text reminder feature especially helps patients with patient text reminders, appointment reminders, personalized invites, and more.

Increase Your Patient Collection with AnodyynePay Text Reminders

AnodynePay simplifies the notification and billing processes, allowing patients to make payments fast and conveniently. As more people use mobile devices to connect with and pay healthcare providers, it is critical to have an established system of Text-To-Pay services in place to send and receive critical billing information while also adapting to changing communication preferences.

So, if you’re looking for a partner to integrate your Text-to-Pay services and improve your revenue cycle, AnodynePay is your choice.

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How Text-to-Pay Services Can Improve Your Revenue Cycle

Febien Caltin

Febien Caltin is a dynamic professional with 20+ years of extensive experience in the healthcare RCM space. He has expertise in Consulting, and Strategic Planning on solving critical issues healthcare providers face in the RCM process. Febien is committed to the growth of healthcare providers through his immense experience.

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