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It Pays To See The Revenue Cycle Through Your Patients’ Eyes

By April Wilson

If you’ve never seen a “perspective sculpture” in person, you’ve probably run across a few online. One of the most famous is dedicated to Nelson Mandela.

From one angle, the sculpture looks like a random gathering of misshapen steel columns. But if you move just slightly, an image emerges of one of the most famous figures in modern history. The sculpture was created to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Mandela’s arrest by the apartheid police.

Perspective is also key in the healthcare revenue cycle.

From one angle, you’ll see a mass of disjointed payments, frustrated patients, and mounting bad debt. With a small shift toward a perspective that centers on patients, an entirely different picture emerges – one that shows simplified payments and a new level of financial engagement.

Here are four tips to smoothing the payment process:

• Start predicting. You might feel like you have deep insight into your patients’ payment behaviors right now, but you have more to work with than you think. Each of your patients has a payment history that is rich in information, including how likely they are to pay, how they prefer making payments, and how consistently they settle their bills. Predictive models can help you evaluate their propensity to pay, assign a score, and establish a starting point for any communications and discussions. Scoring allows you to create order out of the complexity of your patients’ preferences, behaviors and predicted outcomes. Ideally, you will want to turn all that into analytics-based, targeted payment pathways and an intelligent communication plan that promotes patient payment awareness and increases cash flows.

• Tailor communications. It might seem like the entire world relies on their smartphones in every aspect of their lives, but if you take a few steps to shift your perspective on your patients, you’ll find something interesting. Some of your patients are highly responsive to receiving paper bills, others are moved by electronic statements via email, while a few might be more likely to act on text message reminders. These traits can vary by age, location, and even educational level. Notice that we aren’t talking about what methods of communication they prefer. Truly aligning with your patients’ perspectives means paying attention to their behavior. Predictive analytics algorithms can be especially useful in optimizing medium, message, and overall communication strategies for each patient.

• Throw time out the window. Your patients live in a world where, if they wanted to book a flight to see that sculpture of Nelson Mandela at 2 a.m., there would be little stopping them from rolling over in bed and doing just that. If they wanted to pay their latest statement for the knee replacement they had last year at your facility, would they have the same flexibility? Hospitals have seen hundreds of thousands of dollars in returns just by expanding payment options to include mobile and online payment portal methods, and that’s on top of a boost to patient satisfaction. This is because convenience matters. Shift your viewpoint on patient payment to focus on convenience and you’ll be looking at a new world of revenue cycle results.

• Leverage technology. We’ve mentioned technology already, and mostly on the patient-facing side. But there are also back-end solutions that help keep payment experiences centered on the patient. One of the most effective tools is a merchant-service agreement. Merchant services are more of a collection of technologies than a stand-alone solution. A comprehensive merchant-services strategy includes card readers, patient portals, check processing, and cloud-based reconciliation. When these elements play together, hospitals see higher cost transparency, streamlined reconciliation, and a payment experience patients prefer.

The age of healthcare consumerization has arrived, and heightened patient expectations have come along with it. If you haven’t started shifting your perspective on patient payments yet, now is a great time to start.

April Wilson is Vice President of Marketing and Analytics for RevSpring (www.revspringinc.com), a company that provides patient engagement and billing solutions for healthcare providers. Since 1981, RevSpring has built the industry’s most comprehensive suite of consumer engagement, communications, and payment pathways that is backed by consumer behavior analysis, propensity-to-pay scoring, intelligent design, and user experience best practices.

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With the average holiday spending in 2018 expected to reach over $1,000, an increase of 4.1 percent since 2017, the personal-finance website WalletHub today released its 2018 Holiday Budgets by City report as well as accompanying videos, along with its free tool that calculates personalized holiday budgets for all WalletHub members between now and Dec. 25.
 
To help consumers avoid post-holiday regret, WalletHub used several key metrics, such as income, age and savings-to-monthly expenses ratio, to estimate the maximum spending amounts for consumers in each of 570 U.S. cities.
 
The following are some highlights from the report:
 

Cities with the Biggest Holiday Budgets

1

Flower Mound, TX ($2,761)

11

San Ramon, CA ($2,036)

2

Sunnyvale, CA ($2,575)

12

Cary, NC ($2,010)

3

Naperville, IL ($2,528)

13

Plano, TX ($2,006)

4

Mountain View, CA ($2,524)

14

Troy, MI ($1,965)

5

The Woodlands, TX ($2,444)

15

Palo Alto, CA ($1,940)

6

Bellevue, WA ($2,411)

16

Rochester Hills, MI ($1,919)

7

Sugar Land, TX ($2,321)

17

Pleasanton, CA ($1,913)

8

Allen, TX ($2,244)

18

Newton, MA ($1,888)

9

Pearland, TX ($2,238)

19

Rockville, MD ($1,870)

10

Maple Grove, MN ($2,156)

20

Shawnee, KS ($1,842)

Key Stats

• Cambridge, Massachusetts, has the lowest debt-to-income ratio, 17.91 percent, which is 4.2 times lower than in Menifee, California, the city with the highest at 76.10 percent.
   
• Fishers, Indiana, has the lowest expenses-to-income ratio, 59.13 percent, which is 1.7 times lower than in New Haven, Connecticut, the city with the highest at 99.43 percent.
   
• Metairie, Louisiana, has the highest savings-to-monthly expenses ratio, 219.41 percent, which is 2.2 times higher than in Glendale, California, the city with the lowest at 98.21 percent.

 
To view the full report and your city’s rank, please visit: 
https://wallethub.com/edu/holiday-budgets-by-city/16912/

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More than 27,000 Businesses and Residents to Get Improved e-Connectivity

Contact:
Weldon Freeman (202) 690-1384
Jay Fletcher (202) 690-0498

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13, 2018 – Assistant to the Secretary for Rural Development Anne Hazlett today announced that USDA is investing in infrastructure projects in a dozen states (PDF, 132 KB) to improve e-Connectivity in rural communities.

“In the modern economy, rural broadband is a lifeline to quality of life and economic opportunity,” Hazlett said. “With that impact, USDA is fiercely committed under the leadership of Agriculture Secretary Perdue on expanding access to e-Connectivity in rural America.”

According to a 2018 report by the Federal Communications Commission, 80 percent of the 24 million American households who lack reliable, affordable, high-speed internet are in rural areas. USDA’s investments in broadband infrastructure are helping transform rural America, providing innovation and technology to increase economic competitiveness and opportunities.

USDA is investing $91 million through the Telecommunications Programs. The 19 projects will benefit more than 27,000 businesses and households in Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

Here are examples of the projects in which USDA is investing:

• The Arkansas Rural Internet Company is receiving a $19.9 million loan to deploy a fiber broadband system to more than 5,000 subscribers in Dallas, Calhoun and Ouchita counties in rural southern Arkansas. Approximately 25,000 people in the company’s service territory can benefit from broadband access.
• In New Mexico, the Tularosa Basin Telephone Company Inc. will use an $11.8 million loan to improve telecommunications for nearly 10,000 customers in the Carrizozo, Cloudcroft and Tularosa exchanges. Tularosa will build 176 miles of fiber-optic facilities, construct new fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) facilities, and upgrade digital subscriber line (DSL) and FTTP electronics. The improvements will enhance the company’s services and provide subscribers voice and higher broadband speeds.
• The Choctaw Nation is receiving a $2.9 million grant to construct a hybrid fiber and fixed wireless system on unserved portions of Le Flore County, Oklahoma. This project will increase access to economic development, health care, educational and public safety opportunities for 300 households and 15 businesses. It will include a community center in the Hodgen School where the public can access computer terminals and WiFi service free of charge.

In April 2017, President Donald J. Trump established the Interagency Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity to identify legislative, regulatory and policy changes that could promote agriculture and prosperity in rural communities. In January 2018, Secretary Perdue presented the Task Force’s findings to President Trump. These findings included 31 recommendations to align the federal government with state, local and tribal governments to take advantage of opportunities that exist in rural America. Increasing investments in rural infrastructure is a key recommendation of the task force.

To view the report in its entirety, please view the Report to the President of the United States from the Task Force on Agriculture and Rural Prosperity (PDF, 5.4 MB). In addition, to view the categories of the recommendations, please view the Rural Prosperity infographic (PDF, 190 KB).

USDA Rural Development provides loans and grants to help expand economic opportunities and create jobs in rural areas. This assistance supports infrastructure improvements; business development; housing; community facilities such as schools, public safety and health care; and high-speed internet access in rural areas. For more information, visit www.rd.usda.gov.