Healthcare systems continue to struggle with labor shortages alongside increasing patient volume and expectations. One successful solution revolves around consolidation of technologies and vendors to create a more connected patient experience from the moment a patient begins seeking care through final payment.
During a webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by RevSpring, Kristen Jacobsen, vice president of marketing and omnichannel engagement for RevSpring, discussed challenges in the current healthcare landscape and shared how three healthcare organizations have created more connected patient experiences.
Four key takeaways were:
1.) Many patient journeys are disjointed, not personalized and involve too many vendors and technologies. Competing business challenges and patient concerns have accelerated the need for digital transformation among providers. According to Ms. Jacobsen, after a healthcare organization establishes a foundation of high-quality, compassionate care, "the focus on patient experience and consumerism can help you differentiate yourself as a brand and cement that loyalty with patients to keep them coming back to your facility." She emphasized the importance of transforming the patient journey "from just a collection of good experiences to one large, integrated, connected, branded experience . . . with as few vendors as possible.
2.) A leading orthopedic network more than tripled its collections by streamlining its patient experience. This network was juggling too many vendors, had subpar customer experiences and faced soaring call volumes, cancellations and mailing costs.
By working with RevSpring, this organization now provides a good faith estimate before patient engagement even occurs. Patients can digitally preregister and receive appointment reminders in their preferred channel and interact in that same channel without leaving the interaction. After a procedure, patients receive statements in their preferred channel. "The magic is to find the right mix of communications for each patient, so you can offset costs and deliver the experience that patients are expecting," Ms. Jacobsen said.
As a result, this network increased its total dollars paid per month from $750,000 to more than $2.75 million and nearly 92 percent of patients opted to replace printed statements with digital options.
3.) A regional urgent care facility maintained growth and improved its patient experience with no additional staff. This urgent care facility grew rapidly during COVID and wanted to sustain that growth moving forward. However, they faced staffing shortages, struggled to manage multiple vendors and could not effectively mine data from disparate systems.
By working with RevSpring, this facility now allows patients to make their own appointments, receive an estimate and register online. "One priority was to make the intake process as hands-free as possible for staff and as simple as possible for patients," Ms. Jacobsen said. "Another important feature was auto pay, which allows patients to securely store their credit card."
As a result, this urgent care facility could reassign half its billing team and reduce patient registration and wait time. The volume of calls related to bills dropped by about 75 percent. "I like to think of it as staff augmentation, not staff replacement," she said. "How do we use technology to do more with the good people that we do have? This urgent care was able to scale its organization and experience growth without adding any additional staff."
4.) A rural hospital increased its efficiency and patient self-service while decreasing its no-show rate and days to pay. This rural hospital was bogged down with multiple payment portals, had little insight into patient communications trends and failed to meet patient demands for digital communications.
RevSpring helped this organization create digital appointment scheduling and reminders as well as connected payment options. As a result, no-show rates dropped by 2.8 percent, self-service portal usage increased by 47 percent, paper statement volume decreased by 39 percent and the average days to pay was 10.1 days, down from 13.5 days.
Healthcare organizations can transform challenges into powerful opportunities for improving the patient experience and their bottom lines. Technology solutions, such as those offered by RevSpring, connect the patient journey—from preservice through final payment. Patients enjoy a consistent experience that makes check-in, registration, appointment settings and reminders, and payments convenient and personalized. Healthcare staff are free to do more strategic work and problem solving. Best of all, healthcare systems gain a powerful way to differentiate their brands and cement patient loyalty.
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