Healthcare Industry, in this digital age, is not just a business of healing but rather a center for providing a convenient, complete patient experience. Providing a superior patient experience is possible when the practice aligns its revenue goals with patient satisfaction. The revenue flow automatically increases when the practice provides choices to their patients regarding their preferences in payment options, appointments, etc.; one way to provide all these choices is through patient payment software.
According to the PYMNTS Digital Platform Promise survey, 48% reported that online channels improve at least one aspect of the overall payments and billing management experience, and 29% stated digital portals make their experience more convenient.
“Billing and payment collection are among the most critical aspects of medical practice management, and implementing a patient payment portal in your practice can help you improve your revenue cycle management ten-fold.”
This blog explores implementing a patient payment portal to enhance patient satisfaction and practice revenue flow.
In this blog:
- What Is Patient Payment Portal
- Why is a Patient Payment Portal Important in Healthcare?
- What are the Types of Patient Payment Portals?
- How to Implement a Patient Payment Portal in Your Practice?
- How does AnodynePay Patient Portal help?
What Is Patient Payment Portal?
The digital revolution has significantly decreased paperwork. Everything has a digitized form, from appointments to medical records. A patient payment portal is a secure online platform that allows patients to view and pay their medical bills. Patients can access their bills anytime, anywhere, and make secure payments with just a few clicks on their patient payment software.
Medical practices can automate billing and payment collection processes, reduce administrative costs, and improve cash flow. It also eliminates the need for paper statements, which is environmentally friendly. Patients now have many payment options after introducing new and improved patient payment software.
Why is a Patient Payment Portal Important in Healthcare?
Practices that focus on raising patient payments increase their practice revenue significantly. You must create a patient portal to provide your patients with a modern healthcare experience. With patient payment software, practices can provide more transparency to patients regarding their finances and ensure a healthy cash flow with the necessary payment reminders.
- On-Time Payments - Healthcare organizations often face cash crunch due to irregular payments, and patients find mailing cheques and in-person payments tedious. Patient payment portals provide multiple payment options: credit card, debit card, card of file, internet banking, E-check etc. These options ensure that practices receive their payments online and on time.
- Increase Efficiency - Implementing a patient portal for your medical practice can boost productivity by making communication between you and your patients easier. When signing new clients, patient portals save time by allowing patients to fill out personal information electronically rather than repeatedly answering the same questions.
- Enhanced User Experience - Technological advances propel patients toward the demand for better care and convenience. They value the improved user experience and remain loyal to practices that provide medical billing help and a satisfying experience through patient payment software.
- Patient Engagement - Patient portals benefit patient-centered care and boost patient involvement. They grant patients access to their medical records and enable doctors and clinical staff to communicate via email. These records show transparency and contribute to patient satisfaction, improving clinic customer retention.
What are the Types of Patient Payment Portals
Patient Payment portals have existed since the 2000s and are used by Healthcare Organizations for better communication and transparency. Patient Portals classify into two types:
Integrated Patient Portal
Integrated Patient Portal is the most recommended patient portal for all Healthcare organizations as they provide complete convenience with 360-degree access to all Electronic Health records. These integrated portals help an organization by custom integrating all the necessary operations within the system, leaving no need for external customization and extra costs.
Standalone System
A standalone system is a patient portal that works in isolation and does not need an external system. However, it can be an expensive setup that requires manual integration for EHRs/PMS.
While Practices can customize these patient portals, ensuring your patient priorities are aligned and suited with integrated practice management software, as they do not require additional EHR integrations.
How to Implement a Patient Payment Portal in Your Practice?
Implementing a patient payment portal in your practice takes a lot of challenges, but these can be the right addition to your practice under the right conditions. While looking for patient payment portal adoption, the steps that can help you succeed are:
- Align your Healthcare Goals with the Portal
Healthcare organizations and physicians adopt a separate set of goals for their practice based on their patient priorities of either patient retention, vendor requirements, or records maintenance purposes. All Healthcare organizations must adopt a patient payment portal that aligns with their budget, responsibilities, patient priorities, staff efficiency, etc.
- Factors that support your practice
Many organizations have already developed patient portals, but their patients are not using them. This lack is partly due to patients believing they do not require it or see no benefit in using a portal. It could also be due to a lack of functionality on the portals. While exact features may differ depending on the provider and the portal’s capabilities, the following are some frequent characteristics found in a patient payment portal:
“As a healthcare practitioner creating a patient portal, you must know what patients expect to see. If you develop your gateway and your patients don’t use it, you’ll realize you’ve wasted time and money. Following these steps can save you time and avoid complications.”
- Account creation: Patient access is the most important step in the process as patients look forward to a smooth process where logging in must be simple without any extra effort. Patients should be able to create accounts and enter their details without hassle.
- Patient profile: Patients should be able to access their profiles on the go and change their personal information at any time, such as demographics, insurance information, and preferred payment options.
- Billing and invoicing: One of the most confusing patient processes is billing and invoicing. Patients often struggle to understand their complete expenses. The patient portal should provide detailed invoices showing all the expenses to make it easier for patients. This will help patients to understand their bills better and complete their payments promptly.
- Payment options: Regarding payment options, the portal should be accommodating by providing various methods such as credit cards, debit cards, quick pay, recurring ACH, cards on file, or online payment QR codes. These options guarantee that your patients can choose the quickest transaction method available.
- Payment history: The payment history holds significant value in the healthcare provider's association with a patient. Maintaining transparency is crucial, and patients should be granted access to their complete transaction history. This enables them to monitor their financial dealings with the provider, keep track of insurance expenses, and retain receipts that can be utilized for income tax filings.
- Reminders for appointments and payments: The portal offers automated reminders for appointments and payments through text messages, emails, and interactive voice calls. These reminders help with payment confirmations, payment changes, invoice changes, etc.
- Security and privacy: To secure patient data and financial information, strong security measures, such as encryption and compliance with relevant data protection rules (e.g., HIPAA, PCI compliance), should be applied.
- Mobile accessibility: The portal should be mobile-friendly to improve convenience, allowing patients to access and use it from their mobile devices.
- Conducting market research and selecting the right vendor
All the goals of your practice, aligned in the above points, are the most requirements to look forward to while selecting a vendor for your patient payment portal.
- UX design matters the most when choosing a patient portal. Patient engagement increases the most when the patients find the interface easy to interact with and use the portal for payments. Many healthcare app development firms already provide comprehensive capabilities that combine EHR technologies with patient portals.
- Request information from the Vendors and compare different patient payment portals to evaluate and learn about the right option for your practice.
- Hold demonstrations to see how each portal operates and interact with the vendor’s personnel in person. When you’ve decided on a vendor, reach out to practices that have had successful implementations with that vendor.
- By the end of these processes, you should have reduced your vendor selection to a few viable options. To conclude, you must identify objectives, outline how the portal will affect your workflow, and proceed to the contract step.
- Create an onboarding strategy
Your installation will only be successful if your staff and patients understand how to use the portal.
Choose a partner who offers onboarding consultation and training to help them get the hang of the portal so that you can successfully launch your new portal. Patients and staff will be amazed to learn how to use the patient portal with the proper training. Everyone will be eager to access healthcare data through the site when they realize how simple it is.
- Incentives and education to encourage patient adoption
Patients can be encouraged to manage their health care services using portals. Patients’ active participation in their health treatment improves outcomes. Incentives in the form of free virtual sessions or health index results can ease the patients into using the portal and engagement.
How does AnodynePay Patient Portal help?
In today’s digital age, paperwork has been greatly reduced as everything from appointments to medical records now has a digital form. AnodynePay aims to solve the long-standing issue of collecting medical payments for healthcare organizations while providing patients with the option to pay from the comfort of their own homes. Here are a few reasons why healthcare organizations should consider using AnodynePay’s Patient Portal:
- Instant and on-time payments
- Increased patient satisfaction
- Enhanced user experience
- Cost and time savings for both patients and healthcare companies
What sets AnodynePay’s Patient Payment Solution apart is its prevalence as a billing portal that offers numerous benefits to patients and practices alike. Anodyne Patient Portal is a unique self-service option allowing patients to track their medical bills and pay their due amounts easily.
We provide comprehensive support to patients and practices to help them settle their outstanding balances and better understand each other. Patients who use our services are highly satisfied and prefer visiting practices that offer a user-friendly Patient Portal for their billing and payment needs.
