At Becker's 14th Annual Meeting, two leaders from Zotec Partners — David J. Law, chief client officer, and Joe McMurray, senior vice president of patient experience — facilitated an interactive discussion on patient trends and "gold standards" in healthcare billing.
They highlighted the importance of understanding and adapting to the changing landscape of healthcare costs and patient financial responsibility, and shared how Zotec Partners supports hospitals and health systems with revenue cycle processing, direct connections with insurance carriers and patient follow-ups for balance collections.
After sharing data and key trends — such as the decrease in patients' propensity to pay compared to years past — Mr. Law and Mr. McMurray heard from roundtable participants on their challenges in shaping patients' clinical and financial journeys. The speakers outlined best practices in five key areas: time of service collections, revenue cycle management optimization and patient outreach technology, personalized patient services and relationship management. A throughline in the roundtable discussion was the need for a more compassionate and patient-centric approach to billing and using technology (service portals, payment plan setups, artificial intelligence-backed communications) to improve patients' financial experiences.
Below are four key takeaways from the session.
Editor's note: Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
Key takeaways:
- As costs rise and consumers feel less prepared to handle unexpected healthcare bills, achieving patient satisfaction in financial processes is becoming increasingly difficult.
David Law: "Ninety percent of patients say loyalty relies on their financial experience. They might have a great care experience on the clinical side, but if you mess up the financial side, then you mess up that relationship — and no one wants to jeopardize that for trying to collect a bill. It calls for a much more compassionate, sympathetic approach today that Zotec is implementing for our clients." - Patients expect retail-like digital experiences across various touchpoints of their care, including payments.
Joe McMurray: "Frankly, what they expect is a retail experience. That's what we're talking about with using modern AI tools to identify the right channel at the right time with the right duration of campaigns so you're maximizing patient responses. Find ways to make it easy to get in touch with people to drive them to address their balance." - Meeting patients' communication preferences (email, text, paper statements, phone) is crucial for successful billing.
DL: "Just like you don't treat every patient the same way in clinical settings, you can't treat every patient the same way in the financial experience — the linear approach with two statements and phone calls are gone. We're trying to eliminate that and offer different mediums of communication, as well as payment plans and setting them on a much easier path to financial success." - Prompting patient reviews after care or financial interactions can enhance reputation and trust.
JM: "If you're not soliciting feedback, ultimately what you're going to find is the people that leave a Google review are the people that are seeking out to tell you how bad you are. It doesn't represent you as an organization and all the great work that you do. The good work your organization does won't be reflected if you're not explicitly asking people, 'hey, go leave a review, we'd love to hear what you think' — not just cherry-picking the good ones, but really asking people to tell you what they think."