In healthcare, patient-facing technology and electronic health records are meant to improve the overall patient experience. Yet, in a recent Black Book survey, the limited use of these technologies by some organizations has diminished the experience for 89 percent of their younger patients.   More specifically, 69 percent of respondents said that dissatisfaction was due mainly to the discharge and billing process. A lack of transparency, confusion about what the total costs are, and borderline harassment from third-party collections agencies can ruin otherwise great experiences.   What’s lacking?   To achieve the level of engagement and transparency that consumers demand, hospitals need to offer more than just electronic records. In Black Book’s survey, 78 percent of hospitals aren't prioritizing investing in the IT necessary to offer more. That number is shrinking, though, as hospitals depend more on payments from patients.   A brief prepared by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology showed a 10 percent jump in the use of IT, such as patient portals, between 2014 and 2017. However, 24 percent of patients won’t view their EHRs despite being offered access. Many cite privacy concerns, others see no need, and some just don’t know how.   While confusing and unclear billing processes can negatively impact the patient experience, the opposite is also true. When organizations make it easy for patients to understand and pay their bills, their patients are more satisfied with their experiences. That requires revamping both billing and customer service — the two most important avenues of engagement.   3 areas to improve   To achieve that goal, more healthcare organizations and hospitals are turning to online patient portals. They not only give patients access to their records, but also consolidate doctors’ and hospitals’ bills into single, easy-to-understand statements. This increases a patient’s ability and willingness to engage, as well as reduces a hospital’s risk of uncompensated care.   Still, patient portals don’t automatically translate to better engagement. They offer a wide range of features and interactions, but they can do little to positively impact the patient experience until organizations become more adept at optimizing them. In many cases, that means changing their approach to these three main obstacles:   1. Limited use   A recent Healthcare Financial Management Association survey revealed that 94 percent of organizations that use patient portals only use them to collect payments from patients. This is an important feature of a portal, but it’s only one of several equally important ones designed to create an entire experience for patients.   Most portals offer the ability to schedule appointments, receive accurate patient estimates, research and select different payment plans, communicate with care team members, and more. Organizations can use them not only to collect payments, but also to help patients be active participants in the administrative side of their care.   2. Limited interoperability   For a healthcare organization to make full use of patient portals and other health IT solutions, large amounts of data must be gathered from many different sources. For a single patient, that data can include financial information from credit bureaus, health histories from other institutions, and data from personal medical devices.   Limited interoperability makes it difficult for providers to centralize disparate sources of data, which hinders their patients’ ability to make full use of a portal’s features. By creating a portal around a more comprehensive IT infrastructure, organizations can improve their interoperability and, therefore, their patients’ overall experience.   3. A lack of self-service   In the HFMA survey mentioned above, 86 percent of organizations that responded admitted that a portal’s most valuable contribution is creating an intuitive, self-service environment for patients. The ability to schedule appointments and payment plans means organizations don’t have to cold-call patients to remind them of upcoming visits or past-due bills.   When hospitals make full use of a patient portal’s features, they can help patients manage their own accounts from home, work, or the doctor’s office. This level of self-service empowers patients to engage in their healthcare, reducing the likelihood of missed appointments, uncompensated care, inadequate patient experiences, and poor health outcomes.   The fact that more healthcare organizations are offering patient portal access is encouraging, but low patient interaction means they could do more to optimize that access for maximum engagement. Fortunately, the pieces are there; organizations just have to learn to adapt the rest of their operations to make it all fit together.   Start engaging with patients today.

Healthcare consumerism, which describes the ability of patients to shop around for the best value of care, has affected every aspect of the industry. Keeping up with those changes has challenged most institutions as patients become more savvy about healthcare costs and their choices.   But the freedom for patients to choose is only one side of the coin. The other is wrought with financial pain points that come with making the traditional billing model fit the new healthcare consumerism. For instance, organizations have to give patients precise cost estimates, but when patients change insurance coverage or companies change their policies and practices, providers struggle to keep those estimates accurate.   And patients who are hit with unexpected costs after they’ve received treatment are less likely to be able pay their bills. Hospitals and providers suffer from uncollected bills, which is compounded by claims denials.   Fortunately, the idea of healthcare consumerism inherently provides the solution to the pain. Emulating consumerism that's present in other industries, such as retail, means offering accurate and transparent pricing, eliminating uncertainty, and offering patients convenient and comprehensive financial options. Like other industries, healthcare already has a wealth of IT tools to make that possible.   Headaches for patients and providers   Simplifying financial pain points requires one significant change — hospitals and providers must deliver clear, simple information about what factors into their pricing. The first step is ensuring your system can keep up with the constantly changing details of insurance policies, supplier contracts, and everything else that affects those costs.   An automated IT solution can collect up-to-date insurance data, claims history, a patient’s financial situation, your organization’s price, and more before generating an estimate. When this data changes, estimates are no longer accurate, which is why healthcare pricing is so complicated. Therefore, tracking them and updating your system automatically can make it easier.   Most of the industry already uses analytics to some degree. Combined with automated financial data-gathering tools, those analytics can help organizations identify patients who are financially at risk and might qualify for additional funding options. Along with clear and accurate estimates, patients highly value a provider that cares enough to offer affordable financing options.   Alleviating those pain points   Keeping up with policy and other financial changes as quickly as they occur makes healthcare consumerism as beneficial for hospitals and providers as it is for patients. For example, Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers was able to reduce claims denials by 27 percent after implementing payer alerts and patient estimate solutions.   The same strategy helped the College of Medicine at Baylor University collect nearly $4.2 million in underpaid contracts, which it would have missed otherwise. Both organizations have also significantly boosted patient satisfaction with their financial processes, which has led to more positive experiences and reviews.   You can also alleviate financial pain points for patients and your organization by seeing healthcare consumerism as an opportunity instead of a burden. Patients demand the same level of cost transparency and certainty from every other industry. Healthcare organizations now have the incentive (and the means) to prove that they can offer the same level of service.

In a recent healthcare information technology survey, more than 40 percent of chief information officers identified patient matching as healthcare’s top IT concern. And though a quarter of the respondents admitted it wasn’t a current priority for their organizations, they did say that it very much should be. There’s no shortage of reasons why, but the most pressing is the need to reduce medical errors, which account for over 250,000 deaths in the United States every single year. Case in point: Seventeen percent of CIOs acknowledged that errors in matching data with the right medical identities have led directly to adverse outcomes for patients. The numbers speak for themselves: Healthcare organizations must find more effective ways to manage the data within their networks. That begins with building a robust medical database that not only hoses data, but also knows how to match it with the proper patients. How robust EMPIs streamline workflows An enterprise master patient index (EMPI) is a database that can help you clean up your data and eliminate duplicate and inaccurate records. It uses algorithms to match exact data elements among disparate records, as well as elements that fall within an acceptable range of possible compatibility. Using technology that can apply an algorithm of probabilistic and referential matching methodologies will allow healthcare organizations to expand beyond the limitations of conventional single methodology matching, as both probabilistic and referential matching techniques provide a higher degree of likeliness. The system assigns these data points to unique identities that follow patients throughout the organization. Any new data generated within the network is also attached to this identity, meaning physicians, specialists, pharmacists, and other members of the patient’s care team can access and update it as needed. EMPI support tools and unique patient identities are building blocks toward creating a healthcare ecosystem that’s truly interoperable. According to an April 2018 survey by Black Book, hospitals with an EMPI report “consistently correct patient identification at an overall average 93 percent of registrations and 85 percent of externally shared records among non-networked providers.” Unfortunately, not all healthcare systems possess the IT infrastructure to support these programs. And as long as some organizations fail to integrate similar platforms, providers won’t reap the benefits of industry-wide interoperability — and patients will continue to suffer. Whether it’s a frustrating billing mix-up, privacy breach, or a detrimental (or even fatal) misdiagnosis, many errors can be successfully prevented with an EMPI. Filling in the holes The goal of such a system should be to standardize data entry and access within each healthcare organization, as well as across the entire industry. Such a network could protect, govern, and match unique patient identities across every discipline and every aspect of their care continuum. But in order for the system to achieve these goals, you need to be sure you’re feeding it relevant, recent patient information. To ensure you have enough patient data to build an EMPI that accurately matches profiles, ask yourself these questions: 1. What kind of medical care have my patients received before this visit? When patients enter a new hospital, they’re given a brand-new identity, or patient number, that’s only relevant to that healthcare system. The identity you assign them within your own organization doesn’t provide any insight about what they’ve experienced before their current visit — and that’s the crux of the matter. When patient information is siloed within a specific system, you have no view of the patient’s medical history. But when it’s shared across systems and fed into a more dynamic and interoperable data management system, patients will ultimately receive better care. 2. Who are my patients when they’re not “patients”? It’s important to understand who patients are when they’re not in the hospital. Yes, they’re husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But some could be physically fit, while others haven’t seen the inside of a gym in years. Some might get regular checkups, but others cannot afford to see a physician regularly. All of these traits factor into your patients’ identities. With a comprehensive EMPI, you can tie them together to understand the environmental and socioeconomic factors that influence your patients’ health. You can then identify what social determinants of health need to be addressed or could potentially influence the efficacy of certain treatments. 3. Can we identify patients without a picture ID? Biometrics such as fingerprints and iris scans are more secure forms of identification than a photo ID. They’ll not only make it easier to identify patients, but will also offer heightened security against fraud. That being said, even biometric identification isn’t 100 percent secure unless it’s part of a database, such as the EMPI, that accurately matches patient identities with relevant medical data. Accepting that the healthcare industry needs better data management and patient-matching strategies is the first step to realizing those goals. EMPIs have shown organizations the value in universal patient identities. Now, they simply need comprehensive databases that are robust enough to keep patient identities consistent across the entire healthcare ecosystem.

Not every healthcare organization embraced electronic medical records (EMRs) at first. But the incentives and regulations put in place by Meaningful Use and the Affordable Care Act have made it necessary to implement them. Now, organizations are not only embracing EMRs, but also making it easier for their patients to access and manage them through remote portals. According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, approximately 63 percent of patients who used portals did so at their doctors’ recommendation. Despite the growing popularity of patient portals, there are still more than 25 percent of patients who refuse to use them for fear of jeopardizing their data. Considering the sensitive nature of their protected health information (PHI), along with the nearly 5.6 million health records that were compromised last year, those fears are more than reasonable. What can providers do? Hackers have honed in on the healthcare industry for two main reasons: the treasure trove of valuable information in medical records and a sometimes dated approach to cybersecurity. In fact, between 2009 and 2016, more than 30 percent of all big data breaches occurred within healthcare systems. Without proper encryption methods, login redundancies, and detection tools, portals are almost as easily accessible to hackers as they are to authorized users. As their usage grows, that lack of security will become an exponentially greater threat to patients’ PHI and identities. “Many of us are accustomed to keeping the same name and password with our accounts, and as we know, that information is very lucrative to the right individuals," says Victoria Dames, Director of Identity Management for Experian Health. "While it's our due diligence to constantly change them, there are certain scenarios where maybe we forgot to change them or we don’t regularly login and that password may sit idle. When that happens, you want to make sure that you have the right technology in place to be able to catch somebody potentially logging in, trying to impersonate a patient.” Providers can’t lower the value of PHI to make it less attractive to hackers, but they can protect it more effectively with up-to-date cybersecurity measures. These four tips can help organizations bring their patient portal security up-to-date and keep their networks safe from unauthorized access: 1. Automate the portal sign-up process. Automating the initial sign-up process can stop false enrollments into the portal at the source. When implemented correctly, the automation will only require the patient to enter a few pieces of information, and then the software can confirm the user’s identity on the back end. 2. Leverage multilayer verification. After patients have signed up to access the portal, using multilayer verification can ensure all future sessions are equally secure. For example, two-factor authentication adds additional protection on top of conventional login credentials. In addition to a password or PIN, users also have to provide something personal such as a cell phone number, ZIP code, fingerprint, iris scan, or more. If the user’s device, account ID, and/or password are compromised, two-factor authentication can ensure the organization’s network remains safe. 3. Keep anti-virus and malware software up-to-date. Multilayer verification protects users’ direct access to portals, but there are other, more frequent vulnerabilities that also need attention. For instance, HIMSS Analytics recently found that 78 percent of providers experienced ransomware and malware attacks last year. Email is the avenue of choice for malware, and these attacks constantly evolve to slip past conventional security measures. If anti-virus software is outdated, it remains vulnerable to every new iteration of malware that attacks the network. Most solutions allow for automatic opt-ins so updates are downloaded and installed as soon as they’re made available. 4. Promote interoperability standards. When primary care physicians, specialists, and healthcare payers talk to one another throughout the course of a patient’s care, it isn’t always through email. When their systems aren’t compatible, they can’t communicate as clearly and securely as they need to. Interoperability makes it possible for disparate systems to share medical histories and patient data while making that data easily understandable on either system. Because interoperability is essential for improving the continuum of care, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provide standards for healthcare organizations to promote it. More patients and providers are optimistic about using technology to improve the healthcare experience. However, one in five patients remain so suspicious of healthcare data security that they refuse to even divulge some information to their physicians. Fortunately, with the right tools, organizations can effectively strengthen portal security and boost the confidence their patients have in them.

This week, Experian Health is a proud partner of National Health IT Week. U.S. National Health IT Week is a nationwide awareness week focused on catalyzing actionable change within the U.S. health system through the application of information and technology. Comprehensive healthcare reform is not possible without system-wide adoption of health information technology, which improves the quality of healthcare delivery, increases patient safety, decreases medical errors, and strengthens the interaction between patients and healthcare providers. Initiated in 2006 by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), National Health IT Week has emerged as a landmark occasion for using health IT as part of the overall solution to improve America’s healthcare as a bipartisan, federally led, market driven initiative. While the healthcare industry has transformed in the last decade as health organizations have moved to electronic health records (EHRs), it brings us one step closer to the vision of comprehensive care coordination, but fully achieving care coordination across the vast health enterprise is still a long way ahead. While a recent American Hospital Association (AHA) survey showed that nearly all reported hospitals (96 percent) possessed certified EHR technology in 2015, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology reports that there is very little coordination of patient data across the healthcare ecosystem. Much of this disconnect begins with the inability to transfer data in a secure manner that will match, manage and protect patient identities across enterprises. "As hospitals must now deal with hundreds of thousands of electronic patient records, spanning multiple systems and departments, the traditional technologies to managing patient information are no longer sufficient," says Karly Rowe, Vice President of New Product Development, Identity and Care Management Products for Experian Health. "Leveraging sophisticated matching technology and outside data sources, can improve patient identification and prevent duplicate or overlapping records which result in inappropriate care, redundant tests, and medical errors – as well as make data accuracy higher for clinical, administrative, and quality improvement decision purposes." To solve the industry problem of matching, matching and protecting patient identities across the healthcare ecosystem, we must start by creating a universal patient identifier (UPI) to make patient data truly interoperable. For example, one of the biggest challenges in managing patient data begins when patients move, change names, or switch doctors and their EHR doesn’t follow them. They have to start over, trying to recall events and dates in their medical history with a new doctor, who is tasked with providing care without the detailed insight into the patient’s medical record. But if that same patient had a universal identifier that allowed healthcare providers to communicate with another healthcare provider about a patient, the new provider would know all the ins and outs of that patient’s history, leading to a more holistic approach to care and higher patient satisfaction. Simply put, a UPI can be thought of as a mechanism to link all patient information and associate it with the right individual based on patient data. This is similar to how credit bureaus link an individual’s credit history to the right individual to ensure accurate reporting. Using a similar model, patient data — and supporting patient demographic data — can be used for the common good to improve patient safety, increase quality of care and reduce mistaken identity risks. The benefits of a UPI extend across the entire healthcare system as well, as it improves the quality of patient identities, which can have duplicate, overlapping and incomplete records. Additionally, a UPI can help eliminate incorrect medical treatments; deliver current and accurate patient data; and prevent identity fraud, HIPAA breaches and incidental disclosures of protected health information (PHI). Ultimately, this will build patient trust through increased visibility and record accuracy. Knowing that preventable medical errors, many of which are the result of incorrect patient identification, are the third leading cause of death in the United States. The creation of a UPI will allow the healthcare industry to facilitate accurate information exchange to stop problems before they start. For example, if a patient shows up to fill a prescription and is mistaken for another patient with the same name and given the wrong prescription, there could be fatal interactions with other medications that patient is taking. The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) has already started using this technology to establish national patient safety identifiers. A national patient safety identifier, or UPI, is a vendor-neutral, cost-effective solution that will link patient data at scale efficiently and accurately to improve patient safety and care coordination. Identity management is a critical, underlying component to every interaction, and healthcare is no exception. To fully achieve the goal of comprehensive care coordination, creating a UPI to help match, manage and protect patient data is the first step in achieving the interoperability of patient data. Participate in National Health IT Week’s Virtual March and help catalyze actionable change within the U.S. health system through the effective use of health IT.

Healthcare providers are always balancing a million tasks at once. The most important of these tasks, obviously, is serving patients, which can sometimes crowd out the important but thankless business functions — like keeping tabs on the insurers you're processing. Payers are changing their policies and practices constantly, and those changes are easy to miss when you're focused on everything else you have to do to keep a healthcare organization running. But if a payer policy changes without you knowing, it’s going to cost you. If your denial rate ticks up because of an unknown change in payer policy, you could end up spending thousands of dollars per year to rework those extra claims. The good news, though, is that there’s a tool that can lighten the load. Experian Health’s Payer Alerts service keeps you in the loop about the payer policies and procedure changes you’re too busy to catch. That way, instead of poring over the mergers, acquisitions, and countless other details that affect the insurance industry, you can stay focused on what’s really important — without making sacrifices to your bottom line. How it works With Payer Alerts, every notification you receive is the result of extensive behind-the-scenes work by our software. The program monitors more than 50,000 web pages that payers visit and records any relevant policy changes before preparing an alert for you. The alert contains a detailed summary of those changes and a link to the affected policy. Once you receive the alert, you can just follow the link and make the necessary adjustments to your internal procedures. But given the variety of potential policy changes, those adjustments can be tough to pin down. That’s why every alert categorizes each change by healthcare specialty, allowing you to receive the alerts most related to your organization. And the customization goes further than that.Want an email that describes all relevant administrative changes? Done. Want a web-based portal where you can identify any reimbursement issues? Easy. Regardless of what you need, the alert will be waiting for you in the right platform. Finding ROI in new information Being privy to policy changes without having to sift through insurance jargon can mean a lot for a healthcare organization. “When things change and information is always current, that’s a huge benefit,” says the director of managed care at Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, a longtime user of Experian Health’s services. When you’re in the loop about what’s covered and what's not, you’ll also be in better shape to increase your revenue and cash flow. RMCC, for instance, reduced its denial rate to 27 percent in its first year using the service and has reached a $1 million ROI on the investment year over year. Payer Alerts isn’t some app that bombards you with pointless notifications every five seconds. By giving you the necessary information to make timely, strategic decisions, the software can help you start running your practice more like a lucrative business. Building the perfect defense Payer Alerts helps healthcare organizations streamline their workflow and maximize revenue through more than just its immediate features; its compatibility with other Experian Health services can provide the perfect defense against the myriad payer issues that might arise. Combining Payer Alerts with our Contract Manager and Contract Analysis solutions not only keeps you up-to-date with policy and procedure changes, but it also helps you target those changes in ways that meet your unique needs. When RMCC realized that sending out individual forms for different information was wasting time, it used its Experian Health software package to aggregate all the data from those separate appeals into a single form. This helped the company reach its efficiency improvement objectives, satisfying both patients and staff. Ultimately, you can’t fix any issues with your insurance processing if you don’t know they exist, and you won’t even know there’s an issue if you aren’t aware of the constant policy changes in the industry. While you can’t stop these changes from occurring, you can invest in a system to adapt to them and avoid the agony of having to scrutinize it all yourself. If you're ready to learn more about Experian Health's Payer Alerts, get in touch with us today. To learn more about how RMCC used Payer Alerts to increase revenue and cash flow, download the case study.

Last year, the National Academy of Medicine estimated that excessive and unnecessary medical tests waste at least $200 billion a year in the United States. The same report estimated that, in addition to the monetary costs, the mistakes resulting from unnecessary tests and treatments can lead to 30,000 deaths annually. No healthcare organization wants to write wasteful and unnecessary medical orders — they're bad for patients and for business. Unfortunately, given the fact that so many providers might be submitting and fulfilling orders for one patient, finding a way to organize a patient's treatment schedule in the most effective and efficient way can be difficult. For many healthcare organizations, however, Experian Health can provide a solution: Order Manager, a web-based platform for tracking treatment orders. Order Manager in action Experian Health’s Order Manager is a component of its comprehensive eCare NEXT® suite of healthcare workflow solutions. Order Manager facilitates communication between every player in a patient’s course of care — hospitals and health systems, standalone clinics, community physicians, and even testing facilities can all verify or update a patient’s testing and treatment schedules when necessary. Order Manager integrates data into a patient's electronic medical record so all supplementing data or documents he or she accumulates are captured and organized within a centralized interface that has actionable suggestions. The all-in-one platform gives providers a GPS-like ability to track an order until it's completed, and every provider in the patient’s circle of care can see what tests have been ordered, what medications have been prescribed, and what the results have been. With Order Manager, staffers don’t have to manually place orders or call the patient’s original hospital or doctor to verify prior authorizations — no more duplication, no more conflicting and dangerous treatment plans, and no more confusion. When ordering systems aren't automated, it doesn’t just affect patient care; the labs that fulfill the orders are getting squeezed by inefficiencies, too. For Aegis Sciences Corporation, a leader in healthcare and forensic laboratory sciences, Experian Health’s Order Manager helped optimize order processes as efficiently as it has for hospitals. Aegis Sciences wanted to provide staff members with the tools they need to consistently provide a positive experience to patients and the physicians they work with, and Order Manager has been an important tool in helping the company do so. The web-based platform improved efficiency and reduced costs by transforming operations into fully paperless processes. Healthcare staff at Aegis Sciences said Order Manager was key in supporting the quality of the organization’s work, particularly the processes that require certain authorizations to be completed before tests can be ordered. With the help of Order Manger, Aegis Sciences was able to reduce the time spent on tasks such as accessioning — the arduous process of logging and sorting a sample in a larger data collection — to less than a minute. In fact, according to Aegis Sciences: "Experian Health's Order Manager teams were key in helping us realize our vision of a fully paperless process that could improve our workflows and processes to keep pace with our exceptional growth. We're now able to offer a fully paperless process to our clients and require that certain fields, such as demographics and diagnosis codes, be completed on the front end." Client satisfaction at Aegis Sciences has risen thanks to a 27 percent reduction in errors and necessary follow-ups, as well as a 76 percent drop in attestation statements during the verification process. To learn how Experian Health's Order Manager can help your organization improve the quality of care for your patients and consumers, feel free to contact us today. Our team can assess the role that Order Manager could play in your organization's workflow and help you implement it in the most efficient way. To read more about Ageis Sciences' experience, download this case study.

The world of healthcare, as everyone knows, can be complex. And in such a complicated system, solutions that simplify, automate, and reduce busywork can make a real difference in both patient satisfaction and workplace efficiency. Although healthcare is, by its nature, a high-touch field, there are several opportunities to allow automated software solutions to handle the basic processing tasks associated with patient management. When routine interactions with patients are automated, medical and administrative staff members can devote more of their time to the cases that need the most attention. Automated workflow solutions also simplify and reduce busywork to make a noticeable difference in patient satisfaction and workplace efficiency. Obviously, that outcome is desirable for all parties involved. It reduces costs, improves morale, and results in satisfied patients. In an ideal workflow environment, employees can personally attend to problem cases and resolve certain issues manually while an automated system handles the run-of-the-mill cases that cause administrative backlogs. Experian Health has worked hard to develop just such a system. We call it eCare NEXT®. Introducing eCare NEXT The eCare NEXT platform, using an approach called Touchless Processing™, is able to offload a number of key patient processes, including scheduling, preregistration, registration, and admissions. Touchless Processing is an exception-based system, meaning that it automatically flags patients who require manual follow-up with staffers. The system updates data in real time, and users can interact with it through either a work queue system or by responding to triggered alerts. Healthcare organizations using the system can automate up to 80 percent of human intervention in the patient management process — allowing healthcare staff to focus on larger, more important initiatives to improve the patient experience. And Touchless Processing doesn't just free up staff time; patients see immediate benefits as well. One of the biggest frustrations in a patient's experience is the inability to get a reliable estimate for how much a service will cost. The eCare NEXT system sorts through all the complex factors that affect healthcare pricing — which are often too complex for hospital billing departments to accurately estimate on their own — and quickly determines accurate cost estimates for both the patient and insurance. Efficiency results in lowered costs — and happier patients The eCare NEXT system cuts costs in other ways, too: by reducing staff training needs, by ensuring compliance, by enforcing transparency, and so on. The benefits of an automated patient management system can manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. Blessing Health System, based in Quincy, Illinois, implemented eCare NEXT and found that it reliably increased efficiency and accuracy in patient management: "Experian Health provided our staff with a reliable, real-time registration error-alerting process. Our overall registration accuracy rate has improved significantly since implementing eCare NEXT. We now have the tools we need to be successful in one user-friendly application." Blessing's employees found that eCare NEXT improved dashboard capabilities and made it easier to view critical data, including missed estimates and copays. It was a clear upgrade over Blessing's previous system, in which employees manually calculated patient estimates. After adopting eCare NEXT, Blessing's point of sale collections increased by over 80 percent, its clean claim rate increased from 63 percent to 90 percent, and denials went down by 27 percent. And because the process had become so much more accurate and efficient, the average number of days an account spent in accounts receivable decreased by 28 percent. There’s no need to labor under an outdated administrative system that's certain to cause backlogs, errors, and intense frustration for patients and staffers. By offloading patient management work to the eCare NEXT system, healthcare providers can do what they do best: help people. For more information, contact Experian Health or check out our Touchless Processing whitepaper.

In the healthcare industry, transparency is everything — you want your patients to be as informed as possible every step of the way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen with pricing, leaving both patients and providers unsure what the final bill is going to be. That’s where Experian Health’s Patient Estimates tool comes in. With this solution, you can provide your patients with timely, accurate projections of the costs of their care either before or at the point of service. By better preparing patients for their bill, Patient Estimates helps you avoid the underpayment problems you’re likely all too familiar with, leaving you more time to focus on providing the care that really matters. The power of accuracy The pricing process in healthcare is complicated. Constantly translating the shifting policies of insurers, suppliers, and partner organizations requires a level of attention that healthcare providers are rarely able to spare. But unless you thoroughly understand all the details that go into a pricing estimate, the only thing you can really offer is speculation. And patients are stressed enough as it is; the last thing they want to worry about is whether their costs are going to unexpectedly skyrocket once the bill comes. Each projection that comes from the Patient Estimates tool undergoes several data-gathering stages before delivering any results. Patient Estimates collects information from the patient’s insurance provider, including claims history and payer contract terms, as well as the hospital's chargemaster price. This data is automatically posted to a centralized work list, which can be customized by a healthcare provider depending on its needs. Imagine you need a price estimate for a patient who needs a common procedure or you’re trying to pinpoint the costs of a very specific procedure. You can narrow your search in the Patient Estimates platform to match your patient’s unique situation, and then you can easily pull that pricing information back up at any time. Most importantly, this data is equally accessible for your patients — you can print estimates in a variety of languages or customize scripts for your staff to read. As altruistic as this all sounds, Patient Estimates isn’t just a way to fulfill an ever-increasing obligation of state mandates for price transparency. Getting accurate pricing estimates slashes the time you’d spend manually updating pricing lists and scrambling to create an audit trail for a patient. By automating this grunt work and providing accurate upfront information, Patient Estimates can make your collections process easy and efficient — not two words you typically associate with collections. “The tool is really behind a lot of our success with billing and quick client payments,” says the Baylor University College of Medicine’s director of patient access. “Partnering with Experian Health has allowed us to be an advocate for our patients while also protecting our bottom line.” Patient Estimates isn't just a useful resource for patients; it's also an efficient tool providers can use to avoid age-old payment problems. After all, your organization runs on payments, and you’d hate to miss out on essential revenue because you didn’t give your patients accurate information in the first place. Bundle up Combining Patient Estimates with other Experian Health services can extend the benefits across a wider range of services. Patient Estimates connects with Eligibility, for example, to generate up-to-date benefits information that can inform a patient's treatment plan. It also works in lockstep with our Contract Manager solution to price estimates based on a provider’s payer contract, no matter how complicated it is. The College of Medicine at Baylor University is among the providers that use Contract Manager to analyze contracts throughout clinical practice departments. After adopting Experian Health's product suite, the school overhauled its internal collections strategy and generated more than 18,000 patient estimates while collecting $4.2 million in contractual underpayments it would have previously missed. Baylor has used its package of Experian Health products not only to streamline its workflow, but also to improve its patient collections rate and negotiate stronger contracts. You don’t have to draw a hard line between helping your patients and making a profit. In fact, the two go hand in hand when you take the right steps. With Patient Estimates, everybody can get on the same page. Contact our team today to find out how to boost transparency in your organization. To learn more about Baylor University College of Medicine’s experience with price transparency, please download this case study.