How Patient Estimation Software Provides a Better Patient Financial Experience and Gets You Paid Faster
The CMS price transparency rule goes into effect in less than a year. While that’s a good reason to begin preparing, the implications of committing to meaningful patient price transparency go far beyond rule compliance or penalties.
What you should realize as a hospital or health system leader—if you haven’t already—is that government requirements won’t be particularly effective in providing meaningful price transparency. The rule’s stated goal to empower patients is a laudable one, but for a long list of reasons we don’t have time or space to tackle here, complying with the rule won’t necessarily achieve that goal. The real value in providing price transparency is about doing the right thing for patients—by enabling them to be consumers and giving them insight into their out-of-pocket costs.
Beyond that, what about empowering hospitals to collect what they’re owed? Again, complying with the rule certainly won’t do that by itself. But there is a way to achieve both goals and stay ahead of your competition: You must figure out a way to change culture and provide accurate patient estimates for the 300 shoppable services. By making a commitment to empower consumers by going beyond government requirements, you’ll see a combined benefit to both your hospital and patients.
Win Twice with Healthcare Price Transparency
The good news is that you can both empower patients to shop and improve your hospital’s financial health simultaneously. Not only that, but you’ll improve the patient financial experience, a key driver in retaining patients. Sound impossible? It’s not.
Start with patient-facing estimators like AccuReg’s Estimate My Cost®. AccuReg’s patient estimation software provides functionality that’s far more useful than simply meeting CMS rule requirements. Its ability to generate either self-pay estimates or estimates using insurance information and real-time deductible information means the cost estimator can kickstart a cultural change by providing:
- Accurate estimations of patients’ actual out-of-pocket costs
- Reference numbers and print capability to verify accuracy with hospital staff
- Assurance of consistency and avoidance of discrepancies by leveraging the same platform as staff-facing estimations
- Compliance with government guidelines by leveraging chargemaster, payer contract terms, claims history and patient insurance benefits
- Accurate predictions of associated procedures—with the help of AI capability—that are likely to occur in conjunction with scheduled procedures
- Estimation accuracy by incorporating real-time, benefit-specific eligibility data
Solve for Price Transparency to Empower Patients and Increase POS Collections
Truly solving for price transparency goes far beyond meeting regulatory requirements. When you empower patients with the knowledge of what they’re expected to pay, while empowering your registration staff with accurate information about what the patient will owe, you can begin to implement a culture of collections at the point of service or even prior to service. You win twice by providing a better patient financial experience and by getting paid faster.
Perhaps best of all, you improve the patient financial experience while increasing POS collections, and you decrease the cost to collect by moving collections closer to the front end of the revenue cycle.
To learn more about our patient cost estimation solutions and how your hospital can provide patients with the cost transparency they need, download our latest e-book, Strategies for Delivering Price Transparency that Matters.