Patient Self-Service Drives Revenue Growth at Inspira Health

May 12, 2021 - Healthcare has a patient financial responsibility problem. The burden of high deductibles, out-of-pocket costs, and other medical expenses has increased exponentially over the last decade, making it harder for patients to pay their medical bills on time and for providers to run their revenue cycle smoothly.

Data shows that most providers are waiting a month or more for patients to pay their financial responsibility after an appointment. What’s more, the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated the already complex patient collections process, with a majority of providers seeing an impact on patient collections during the pandemic. Providers largely reported that their processes need to be more flexible to accommodate evolving patient needs, such as financial assistance and payment plans.

Accelerating the patient collections process is a major opportunity for most provider organizations, especially after the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. But a lack of digital tools and patient self-service capabilities has hindered healthcare’s progress with addressing the pressing patient financial responsibility problem.

“In most other industries, patients have the ability to do an online payment and to do an online payment with ease,” Lynda Carbone, director of patient business services at Inspira Health, recently told RevCycleIntelligence. “They can also receive electronic statements and have a really easy way to get those.”

But that was not the experience patients at the multi-hospital system in southern New Jersey received in 2017, according to Carbone.

READ MORE: Top Ways to Improve Collection of Patient Financial Responsibility

“The patient portal we had was HTML-based,” she explained. “It required a lot of manual data entry. The statements were not very visually appealing with the coding and the way that they were laid out. They were confusing to our patients, required a lot of explanation, so that generated a lot of calls to our patient business services customer service team.”

In short, patients at the hospital system did not have the self-service capabilities they typically used to pay other bills, whether it be a car loan or the cable bill.

“What we were looking for was not just to accelerate payments, but to really drive revenue growth, thinking that if we offered better options to our patients to make payments, maybe we could really get more payments,” Carbone explained. “And that's exactly what we saw.”

“We were able to generate an additional $1.5 million dollars in revenue over the first two years of our relationship with Patientco because we generated additional money and patients made more payments.”

Enabling self-service capabilities

The idea of patient self-service isn’t new. As one healthcare consultant put it in 2017, “we live in an experience, self-service economy … We’ve been hesitant in the healthcare space to move towards that in some respects because we have taken a very evidence-based, risk-adverse approach to delivering care.”

READ MORE: Providers Overhauling Patient Collections Strategies For COVID-19

A lot has changed since that time, including the advancement of revenue cycle management technology, introduction of the digital front door, and the emergence of a novel, highly contagious virus.

COVID-19 has particularly spurred the demand for patient self-service capabilities as self-service scheduling, registration, check-in, and other patient access functions have become the norm in a socially distant world. Moving forward, patients are expecting more self-service capabilities and for their providers to apply them to other aspects of their experience, including collections.

Technology is the backbone for meeting this demand and seeing a return on investment, and potentially more.

Inspira Health, for example, redesigned its patient portal and partnered with patient payment technology company Patientco to implement a suite of digital tools, including patient wallet capabilities.

“Patients can now go in and make payments online much easier than they could with our original solution. The product was much more automated, requiring much less data entry,” Carbone said, “It also allows patients to set up automated recurring payments through the portal. Previously, patients had to call into our customer service team if they wanted to set up some type of automate, recurring payment. And even then, they had to receive a statement and send in a monthly payment. Now, they can have an amount automatically drafted from their accounts each month.”

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Inspira Health also tapped technology to deliver electronic bills and statements, giving patients another option besides mail and text to receive their bills.

“We thought that with the portal and the eStatements, the interaction really would provide patients with what they needed to really interact with us better. And what we saw was patients increasing the amount of self-service interaction that they had,” Carbone stated. “Patients were making payments sooner. They were setting up payment plans where they were paying a larger monthly amount than they had previously paid and the payment plans were for a shorter duration than they had previously set up.”

Lessons learned

But technology must be user-friendly in order to drive more self-service interactions and, in turn, healthcare revenue, Carbone warned. With Inspira Health’s previous HTML-based patient portal, for example, patients would try to pay their bills as evident by the amount of data entry created but many did not create payment plans or use the portal for payment again.

“It wasn't user-friendly enough for them to want to use it on a recurring basis,” she said.

Besides an improved patient portal with patient wallet capabilities, Inspira Health also made its new self-service capabilities more user-friendly by connecting the digital tools to its app, My Inspira. And while patients now have self-service options across a variety of sources, staff all have patient billing information in one place through the technology suite.

Change management was a major challenge for getting staff trained and working with the new capabilities, Carbone admitted. However, a phased implementation across its hospital and physician services and training support from the vendor has helped Inspira Health grow revenue in addition to accelerating the collections process.

“Always look for a vendor that will partner with you,” Carbone concluded. “You want to have a relationship with a vendor that clearly understands your needs and is willing to work with you to meet those needs. Focusing on creating a good patient experience wherever you can and however you can is always a win for the hospital.”