Yale New Haven Health (YNHH) established a goal to elevate the patient financial experience by compassionately educating patients about the finances surrounding their care, and educating staff on the tools and methods for delivering that message. YNHH embarked on a two-year patient financial advisory initiative, including patient and family advisors, to hear opinions and learn valuable information directly from consumers. According to Sharlene Seidman, Executive Director Corporate Business Services, with Yale New Haven Health: “We needed a consumer-focused price transparency strategy that would bring us on par with other industries, like retail. Our goal was that when patients discuss their overall YNHH experience, it is not just reflective of their clinical care, but their financial care as well.” Since going live with Eligibility and the Epic integration in May 2016, YNHH has made major strides toward meeting its pre-service excellence goals in four key areas 1) the right technology, 2) best practices, 3) patient interaction/engagement, and 4) employee culture and education. Read the full case study here

Consumers have come to expect the ability to check things off their to do list while online, like booking travel, shopping, etc., so it only makes sense for healthcare organizations to empower patients to schedule their medical appointments online, too. Not only is it easy and convenient for them, but it also saves your staff time. With today’s focus on value-based care, providers must ensure patients follow through with orders for care. Typically, over one-third of patients receive an order, but 20% never schedule a visit, putting their health—and your organization’s reimbursement levels—at risk. Using an online scheduling platform enables patients to schedule appointments online—improving patient access by fostering the integration and communication to make sure both patients and providers have a better care experience. Experian Health’s Patient Schedule is an online, data-driven scheduling platform that enables patients to schedule their appointments online. Patient Schedule helps you ensure patients are being scheduled for follow-up into your network, automates scheduling workflows with business rules to enable you to define appointment criteria, and even integrates in real-time with your practice management system and electronic medical records. If you’re ready to upgrade the patient experience, improve completion rates, optimize capacity, outcomes and practice performance, acquire new patients and keep them engaged, save time by enabling call-center agents to schedule directly into referral providers’ systems and improve staff efficiency and optimize provider calendars, find out more about Patient Schedule. Read our press release: Experian Health and MyHealthDirect team up to improve practice workflow with cloud-based patient scheduling across healthcare networks On Demand NAHAM-hosted Webinar: "You Can Book Flights Online – Why Not Medical Appointments?

Look forward to a better bottom line—and increased patient satisfaction Many providers face a of lack insight into agent performance and call durations, as well as the ability to route telephone calls to representatives based on experience or inquiry type. Others use manual vs. automated processes to call patients with outstanding balances. Having the ability to both contact patients and take inbound calls using a cloud-based dialing platform can significantly increase your collections and penetration rates. Some platforms can even provide the ability to monitor agent activity for performance and take payments after hours when no live agents are available, and provide access to actionable insight into call volumes and durations, giving you the ability to make more strategic decisions and adjust process flows. Increase the effectiveness of your collection and patient engagement strategies by pairing online and print communication channels using outbound and inbound dialing technology. Experian Health’s new cloud-based dialing solution, PatientDial, arms providers with the tools and data needed to make strategic decisions and increase calling campaign effectiveness and the collections bottom line—all without the need for costly hardware and software upgrades. PatientDial assists with patient outreach for patient collections and patient engagement processes and workflows. Services include inbound, outbound and blended call environments and can accommodate both live agent and blaster (unattended) messaging campaigns. IVR services are available to route calls to the proper type of agents and handle payments after hours. When combined with our PaymentSafe solution, PatientDial enables patients to make automated payments via telephone, and combining with our Collections Optimization Manager solution further increases ROI by leveraging screening results and segmentation to drive strategy solutions. Learn more about PatientDial Read the Sanford Health case study  

Multi-specialty, academic, non-profit healthcare delivery system increases productivity and improves resource efficiency The prior and pre-authorization inquiry and submission processes within patient access can be challenging for healthcare providers, as it’s often manual, cumbersome, and steps within the process can be missed or poorly integrated—frustrating both staff and patients. Experian Health’s Authorizations helped one of its healthcare delivery system clients increase efficiency and empower staff to spend more time with patients to discuss estimated liability and financial responsibility and provide them with payment plan options. “We needed an authorization solution that was integrated within our Epic workflow, easy-to-use and that our team could rally behind. We found that solution in Experian Health’s Authorizations tool.” —Director, Pre-service Center, multi-specialty, academic non-profit healthcare delivery system Inquiries are now automated and take place behind the scenes without user intervention. Submissions guide the user through the workflow, auto-filling all payer data and only prompting the user only when manual intervention is required. Hear more about this client’s success using Authorizations. Read the full case study.

During HIMSS17 in Orlando, Jason Wallis, Senior Vice President, Patient Access at Experian Health, sat down with IntrepidNOW to talk patient access and how Experian Health's solutions help providers across the revenue cycle. Excerpt below: "We have the eCare NEXT platform that drives a lot of our integration and patient access products. So anywhere from orders, all the way back to collecting payment from the patients, so right identity, checking eligibility, authorizations, medical necessity, patient estimates and then a tool to collect payment from that patient for those estimates. ...we’ve really taken this eligibility rail that has been pretty standard in the industry, and we’ve added a lot of content and innovation on top of those rails. So I almost call our clearing house a content network. So we drive more value in that transaction by normalizing, cleaning the data and enriching it with other data assets, so that downstream our clients and our products are better because of that advanced content. ...our integrated platform takes this data and be able to start chaining products together, and deliver back to the provider an exception based workflow that really has their staff only looking and working when something’s gone wrong. And the more we can automate around products and even products chaining off of other products, so eligibility to notice of admission, we are able to remove some of those manual single point solutions because it’s integrated in a single workflow." Listen to the full podcast Learn more about Experian Health's patient access solutions and eCare NEXT platform  

Phillip Scott of NCPDP attended HIMSS17 and took some time to chat with IntrepidNOW about NCPDP's strategic alliance with Experian Health and the benefits of a universal patient identifier. Below is an excerpt from that interview. "Well, I have to say with NCPDP’s reputation of neutrality is it’s been a key to our business, our business model. We bring all parties to the table. It’s big in collaboration and all of our standards and best practices come from a consensus building environment. Well, having said that, we have been looking for some time at a relationship that could create a unique patient identifier, at least our version of what that would be. We vetted a number of different companies and actually started working on this in 2013. The good fortune brought us in touch with Experian [Health], and we come together nicely, culturally. We both spent a tremendous amount of effort working for the common good, and the solution that Experian [Health] brought to our vision for what a unique identifier was made for a great opportunity there, and we’ve been very excited about that offering. That UPI, that universal patient identity, would go to that number and when they marry my prescription or my pharmacy benefits to my medical benefits. Then it can move over and move out of pharmacy and over into the health systems. So not only is it great service, it’s just fun to think about it. So our effort gives you 2 versions of a flavor, we as an American consumers are all about instant gratification, right? So this gives you instant gratification because Experian [Health]'s identifying the numbers and identifying those patients uniquely, and sending it back to you, that is an instant gratification." Listen to the full podcast Learn more about Experian Health's Universal Identity Manager solution

During HIMSS17, Experian Health's Nicole Rogas, Senior Vice President of Sales, sat down with IntrepidNOW to discuss the healthcare industry, challenges providers are facing and women in health IT. Excerpt below. "...it’s an industry that changes consistently, and Experian Health has the data and the history to be able to arm both our clients, which our providers, and the consumer, which is the patient, with information to help them make better healthcare decisions. We are hearing more about it in IT and as well as other areas of healthcare really nationally. Women do play a very important role in the future of healthcare, and I think the focus on it now brings to light some of the sort of special issues and challenges we face as women that are very different than what man may face as they grow their career. ...a lot of the challenges for our providers is to understand how to function as a business, and I know that that might sound crazy, but healthcare is always been a service, and most of our economies today, most of our people today believe that it’s really their right to (have) healthcare, and I think what’s happening is our healthcare providers are having to function more like a business organization to ensure that they are providing care at really great quality care, but in an efficient way. They are able to build and get reimbursed for that care, and then that they are able to arm their patients with the right information pre and post care to help keep them engaged in both their financial and their clinical journey. So I just think it’s a big time in our industry." Listen to the full podcast

Last week, Experian Health announced the launch of Patient Schedule, an innovative new solution that allows for real-time integration across organizations to streamline active patient self-service appointment scheduling, powered by MyHealthDirect. During HIMSS17, Jason Kressel, SVP Product and Account Management of MyHealthDirect, sat down with IntrepidNOW for a discussion about online patient scheduling. Excerpt below: "I think healthcare organizations are recognizing that in order to be competitive that they have to offer services that patients are demanding. And so while offering online scheduling for patients is a different way for patients to access healthcare providers requiring a little bit of a change to the provider workflow, ultimately they’re seeing the value of doing that because patients are more adherent to the services that they are supposed to be obtaining, and they’re happier when they come into the physician’s office. So there’s definitely work that’s done with the healthcare organizations to explain the changes in workflow, and what it means to make online scheduling accessible for their communities. But at the end of the day I think they all recognize the value of offering those types of services and are slowly shifting to full adoption. ...So one of the things that we will be working on is, from that Experian patient portal once they have a patient engaged through that channel, allowing the patient to search for a provider and book an appointment directly from the Experian patient portal. Another example, Experian Health does a lot of work around order management, if a hospital creates an order for a service that should take place in an ambulatory setting, right now they can manage the order but they can’t schedule the appointment for that, so we’ll also be incorporating the ability to schedule directly from the Experian Health platform." Listen to the full podcast Read our press release, "Experian Health and MyHealthDirect team up to improve practice workflow with cloud-based patient scheduling across healthcare networks" Learn more about Patient Schedule  

Earlier this year, Experian Health joined forces with hc1.com to empower companies to recapture lost revenue, control costs and better serve patients. At HIMSS17, Brad Bostic, CEO of HC1 sat down with IntrepidNOW's Joe Lavelle to discuss this and healthcare industry trends. Excerpt below: "...our customers has really span medical laboratories, health systems and post-acute care providers. And the common challenge that these organizations face is that they’re so intensely focused on their internal clinical quality and processes and how do you code for things to make sure that they can get billed, that it’s difficult for them to rise up to the level of truly seeing the full picture of what they’re doing with their customers, and understanding holistically where do I have areas that I need to focus to be able to perform better financially? ...what we’ve done is we’ve really built this partnership to bring healthcare relationship management together with the best of Experian Health’s products in the eCare NEXT and payer alerts areas, and what eCare NEXT and payer alerts do in combination with our HIPAA compliant HC1 platform is that we’re able to bring this level of financial risk stratification to the picture, so that if I’m a lab I can see across all the different providers that are referring to me and all the different patients that are flowing through, where are the places where I might be exposed to where I might not get reimbursed? And it’s doing this on the front end of the process rather than having it be an unpleasant surprise later on in the process that you haven’t gotten paid." Listen to the full podcast Explore our revenue cycle management solutions