Streamlined payment acceptance increases bill collection efficiency

Health systems struggle to streamline and expedite payment services, resulting in unpaid bills and overtaxed resources. Attempting manual bill collection or relying on clunky, outdated payment solutions overcomplicates bill collection and disrupts patient care.

About the client

An integrated, nonprofit health system focused on helping patients achieve optimal care by offering convenient, accessible, and affordable care to its community. The organization consists of:

• 7 hospitals
• Telehealth capabilities
• 125 off-site medical practices including primary care, specialty practices, outpatient settings, home care services, and skilled nursing and rehabilitations facilities

“We didn’t have tools in place to collect payments. Staff manually entered credit cards, and there was a lack of transactional accountability.”

—AVP of Revenue Cycle

How Practice Management Bridge® helped

• Standardized the in-person payment experience across the entire enterprise, for both users and patients
• Created a tailored, integrated experience for online patient payment transactions for all entities through Practice Management Bridge®
• Automated the daily posting workflow for every location or payment type initiated
• Created query logic search function based on single patient validation to find all network balances associated with a certain guarantor

“Practice Management Bridge simplified the payment experience across the entire system. They created a seamless, integrated experience that’s more convenient, accurate, and efficient for us and our patients.

—AVP of Revenue Cycle

In-office workflows

Established compatibility with multiple 3rd party vendors including assistance for:

• Bad debt collection
• IVR services
• Home care and remote workers
• Ambulance services

Created customizations to enable:

• Each user to reconcile at the end of their shift
• Managers to view team’s collection activity for any time period
• Cash operations to reconcile payments to their practice management system
• Finance to reconcile each bank deposit to any and all entities
• Accurate patient account posting through an automated, unique payment identifier
• Compatibility with other sources of income such as the cafeteria, gift shop, and parking
• Automatic association of location and internal department with each payment
• Receipt of payment to be printed
• Detailed patient balances from multiple practice management systems, including Eclipsys, Envision, Athena, Sorian Financials, and Cerner Patient Accounting, via file and API methodologies

Custom web portal

• Patients identify themselves by their Patient ID, Statement ID, or Guarantor ID
• Allows patients to pay statements across multiple entities online
  

By the numbers

• Over 500 user accounts created
• Over 500 workstations configured
• Fully operational on 5+ patient engagement screens and scalable for more