How Patient Statement Services Can Improve Your Payments?
Healthcare is a very time-sensitive industry. Providers often have a constant flow of new patients. It becomes hard to keep an eye on the administrative process if you run a practice with a limited staff. A single mistake or delay in the billing process can damage revenue growth. No healthcare organization likes to have bad debts. You must know how critical and time-consuming the invoice generation process is. Without a dedicated account department, you can not produce accurate and high-quality invoices.
The challenge becomes more extraordinary when you are managing multiple patients in a short time. Manually tracking every invoice is much more stringent for a practice with limited resources. What is the solution to these complications?
You need to consider patient statement services to streamline your medical billing process. This blog will explore the benefits and features of these services for your practice.
What are Patient Statement Services?
A patient statement is a medical bill that a provider sends for providing healthcare products and services. They can either use direct mail automation software or electronic communication to send these invoices.
Healthcare providers spend a considerable amount of time and money in sending patient statements. However, manual processing can take time and lead to errors. It would help if you had a dedicated administrative department to manage this medical billing.
Patient statement services are famous for saving time and reducing administrative costs. You can collect your payment more efficiently and help your staff focus on patients. A healthcare organization can better focus on its goals and operations instead of getting busy with administrative processes.
Benefits of Using Patient Statement Printing and Mailing Services
Any healthcare provider expects a precise, personalized, and transparent billing process. It is their only hope to ensure continuous revenue and no bad debts. You can make your payment collection process faster and more effective by enjoying the following benefits;
Timely Generation of Patient Statements
Patient statement services can instantly generate bills without delays. You will never have a backlog of statements when you have a trustworthy vendor. It can be a game changer for providers with multiple patients and a limited workforce.
Higher Accuracy in Statements for Smoother Clearance
There’s always some scope for errors with manual billing processes. Patient statement services use automated direct mail solutions to streamline the printing and mailing process. It ensures highly accurate invoices for your patients.
They will never find discrepancies when you rely on a trustworthy vendor. High accuracy also reduces your expenditure on fixing mistakes.
Improvement in Patient and Doctor Satisfaction
Timely patient statement services provide better communication between patients and doctors. Patients can know why exactly doctors are charging them. At the same time, physicians can provide complete information to the healthcare provider.
Fully Transparent Billing Practices
Manual billing processes can have multiple loopholes. Any malicious actor can exploit them to scam the patients or the providers. Patient statement services provide complete, transparent details to all the stakeholders without discrimination.
A Robust Mechanism to Track Patient Dues
Every provider needs a solid system to track dues. Patient statement services provide a robust mechanism to evaluate every expense and bill. Your accounts department will be pleased when you have a record of every expenditure and dues.
Eliminate Bad Debts
A growing debt can crumble the operations of your healthcare organization. You must always send patient statements to get timely reimbursement. These invoices will work as a notice to reduce bad debts.
Why is Customization Vital in Patient Statement Services?
Customization is the most crucial feature you should expect from your patient statement services vendor. Without personalization, you are losing control over your statements.
A statement is also a fantastic marketing opportunity for healthcare companies. Your vendor can save time and money on designing individual bills. However, you mustn’t sacrifice the look of your statements.
The appearance of your statements can have a significant impact on your consumers. 80% of people read every direct mail before discarding it.
What if you had the option of customizing your statements from templates? It would make a remarkable difference to your brand and its patients. You can include branding elements like layout, logos, colours, etc.
People will start to recognize your firm when they see those patient statements. Even dental patient statement services should provide the convenience of customization.
The vendor must provide a dynamic template editor to make your job easier. This way, your bills will stand out from the pile of mail your patients go through.
How to Track Your Patient Statements?
You might get the best patient statement services with the highest accuracy and cost savings. However, a constant eye on payment status is also necessary. Your revenue will continue to drop if you don’t have tracking capabilities.
What to do to resolve this problem?
Your vendor must use the PostBar or Intelligent Mailing Barcode service to enable tracking features. This way, you can accurately predict incoming revenue sources for your healthcare business.
It is pointless to manually call the postal service to learn about the status of your statements. They will further keep you waiting and in a state of confusion.
What Marketing Opportunities Do You Get with Patient Statement Services?
These days, healthcare experiences require constant communication with patients. A single negligence can make them go for your competitor. You don’t ever want this to happen with your practice.
A great patient experience starts with consistent communication. There are plenty of options to reach your patients. However, you won’t get the assurance that your patients will see your marketing content.
They might miss your ads while using any platform. Marketers can use piggyback communication to reach their clients. The billing envelopes provide sufficient space to insert marketing material apart from the invoice.
Many patient statement services provide this feature to healthcare providers. You get the perfect room for adding additional information. Up-selling and cross-selling opportunities are endless when you consider this service.
Patients always pay attention to their bills and consume additional marketing material. Many practices use this strategy to communicate their messages. They get ample opportunities to spread the word without being intrusive.
You can include lab reports or prescriptions in the patient statements instead of only marketing materials. It would save you a lot of mailing costs.
Types of Patient Statement Services
Vendors will give you different types of services for your healthcare business. Depending on your requirements, you can choose from;
Mail Statements
Everyone loves the feel of actual paper statements. Healthcare providers can use direct mail to send their patient statements. It gives a feeling of urgency and professionalism with physical bills.
Digital Statements
Millennials prefer getting electronic statements. They can easily access and store these bills on the go. Providers can increase their speed and reduce administrative costs with digital solutions. It saves time and boosts overall efficiency.
Auto-Scheduling of Statements
Some vendors automatically schedule patient statements after the healthcare firm provides a service. They never have to resend the statement and prevent over-billing. It is a perfect solution for busy practices with multiple clients.
Patient Statement Printing
Providers can also integrate services into their systems to print patient statements automatically. It prepares them with paper statements for instant processing.
Patient-Friendly Statements
Some patient statement services generate easy-to-understand bills. They use simple layouts and formats to populate the billing information. Patients never face challenges while reading these bills.
Regulations and Best Practices for Patient Statement Services
Experts suggest creating groups of patients to send patient statements each week of the month. This practice makes a constant flow of revenue throughout the month. However, it would help if you considered the following regulations while drafting patient statements;
- Secure Statement Printing. You must protect your patients’ personal information according to PIPEDA and HIPAA standards.
- Smooth Access to Information. Your patients must be able to access their healthcare and personal information easily.
- Highlight Your Brand. Your recipients must acknowledge your practice right away from the invoice.
- Mention Payment Options. Provide clear information about payment options so patients will select the suitable one. It shows how easy it is to settle their payments. For example, cash, credit card, check, PayPal, etc.
- Clear the Confusion. Patient-friendly statements will help recipients know about the total fee, complete price breakdown, and the insurance company’s involvement in the payment.
How Can Address Verification Streamline Your Patient Statements?
What if your patient statement never reaches its intended destination? Sending physical invoices requires accurate and up-to-date address information. Invalid or obsolete data will lead to failed deliveries.
Your patient won’t get their statement on time, and you won’t get any payment. You can make silly mistakes in your patient’s address while sending their statement. Here are some possible errors;
- The patient gave an incorrect address during their appointment.
- An employee needs to correct the address while creating the statement.
- The envelope contains an invalid address.
- Your staff don’t have their latest address information.
What is the solution?
An address validation software can verify, standardize, and fix patient addresses. Your team will never need to worry about the correctness of patient postal addresses.
An AVS automatically verifies hundreds of addresses within seconds with maximum accuracy. It cross-checks the data against the official Canada Post address database.
How Can PostGrid’s Patient Statement Printing and Mailing Services Help You?
Are you looking for patient statement services fully compliant with PIPEDA and HIPAA standards? PostGrid’s print and mail API could be your best choice.
It can handle all your sensitive and transactional mail with complete automation. You get a highly scalable API with unlimited sending possibilities for your healthcare firm.
The Best Use Case for Patient Statement Services
PostGrid’s direct mail API can integrate seamlessly with any EHR or CRM system. You can create automated workflows that print and mail patient statements with minutes. Many clients define set triggers to send these invoices directly to their customers.
The automation works in response to events within your CRM or EHR software. You save plenty of time and effort with this API.
Features that Make the API Standout
Highly Secure and Compliant Communication
Our API is compliant with PIPEDA, HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC-2 standards. You never need to worry about any compliance breaches or security issues. We keep your patient information safe with enterprise-grade security.
Personalize Your Billing Statements
Our patient statement services provide complete personalization options to make your invoices stand out. You can explore our template gallery and built-in template editor to create unique designs for your healthcare brand.
Tracking and Reports
Use our API to track the delivery status of your patient statements. The unified dashboard provides complete information about all your mailers. You can also use the API for your marketing campaigns.
Smoothest Integrations
We understand you use a CRM or EHR system to manage your healthcare operations. Our API can seamlessly integrate itself to provide you with automation capabilities. You only need to input data into your system to print and mail all patient statements.
Sign up now to access automated patient statement services.
