Americans collectively owe almost $200 billion in medical debt. With inflation rising, the cost of living increasing, and healthcare providers struggling to keep up with post-pandemic demand, this ballooning debt is causing patients and providers alike a lot of undue stress.
At the same time, the country’s medical debt collection processes are changing. In March, credit reporting agencies announced they will exclude all medical debt under $500 from credit reports by the first quarter of 2023. Furthermore, agencies will wait longer to report larger medical debts to accommodate patients who need more time to figure out and calculate their healthcare payment status.
Healthcare leaders are under pressure to make patient bill care easier and more transparent. They need ways to remain profitable while putting patients — and their financial well-being — first.
Why is prioritizing patient well-being such a challenge?
It’s clear that one of the healthcare industry’s priorities in the coming years must be making healthcare profitable for providers and affordable for patients. But what does this mean in practical terms? Why is this balancing act still so challenging for healthcare leaders?
For starters, the industry’s surroundings have shifted drastically in the last few years, and the economy has not lent itself to profitability or well-being. We’re living with a 40-year high in inflation, and deductibles are up without a match in salary increases. Patient payers are taking on more of the financial responsibility of their healthcare, and 49% of Americans wouldn’t be able to pay an unexpected $500 medical bill without going into debt.
This financial landscape is very real for patients, and stress is high. Emotional turmoil has always been part and parcel of healthcare — people are full of fear when they or their loved ones are sick and in pain — but stress is especially overwhelming now with medical debt carrying even higher stakes.
Patient expectations have also changed. They are seasoned digital consumers now with several choices in most areas of their lives. While people need a safe and clear healthcare experience, they also want a retail-like experience with the ability to choose their preferred methods for care, payment plans, and communication.
Education is at the core of every successful profession. It provides you with the tools, knowledge, and experience that positively influence the outcomes of your work. However, some industries heavily rely on pedagogy more than others, out of which healthcare dominates them all.
The healthcare sector plays a vital role in patient care, impacting community wellness. It ensures that patients are healthy, protected by robust policies, and skilled professionals work with the community. The healthcare industry has many tasks to accomplish in a day. Therefore, the field has to hire highly qualified medical workers willing to commit to lifelong learning. Here’s how educated medical experts keep the sector flourishing:
Better Care Provided By Nurses
Nurses are necessary to ensure patients get the help they need. They need to record patient data, relay the information to doctors and take care of the patients undergoing treatment. As a nurse, you can start your career with an Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN). Still, this qualification alone cannot prepare you to independently care for patients and ensure their safety. An ADN degree is only a stepping stone into the healthcare sector. If you want to become a registered nurse, you will need to polish specific skills, knowledge, and expertise.
Going from ADN to BSN online will save you time and fill in the gaps in your knowledge and skills. You will have the confidence to communicate more openly and professionally with a diverse group of patients. A BSN degree will also help you work on complex cases without hesitation. Such as establishing a standard EHR language, interpreting lab results, and resuscitating crashing patients. This will make patients more comfortable around you, trust your judgment, and make you a better patient advocate.
By Travis Schneider, chief corporate development chair, Tebra.
In a digital-first world, it is more important than ever for physicians to implement strategies that meet patients where they are. To grow and retain a patient base, physicians must implement tools and technologies that set them apart from other practices and physicians online. With the right practice growth software and business strategies, independent practices can quickly execute the best methods to grow and retain their patient base.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
When selecting a healthcare provider in today’s digital age, 74.5% of patients turn to the internet. To remain competitive, your practice needs a strong online presence. First, examine and optimize your website by ensuring it is user-friendly and that information like phone numbers, provider information, and addresses are accurate.
Search engines, like Google, are where patients start searching for healthcare information. Ensuring your website features keywords related to the practice and healthcare field can help boost the search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. The higher a practice website ranks, the more visibility the website will have with potential patients using Google to find their next physician.
Another way to optimize a website is by ensuring that the pages of the website are also SEO friendly. This means content on a website should be unique, include links to drive traffic, and have relevant keywords throughout the page content.
Maintain a Great Online Presence
Start by claiming and updating your Google business profile through Google My Business (GMB) to build an excellent online presence. Doing so will ensure prospective patients see the most accurate information about your practices and services. In addition, by displaying various business information in multiple formats, Google makes it easier for patients to find information about your practice without the need to navigate directly to your website.
Like your Google business profile, updating your profile on popular sites like WebMD, Yelp, and Facebook is crucial. All information must be accurate and engaging. For example, include your practice address, hours of operation, key services, and photos or videos showcasing your office and providers. In addition, patients may research potential new doctors; without updated profiles, you risk losing patients.
Take Advantage of Patient Feedback
According to PatientPop’s survey, 74% of patients report that reviews affect their decision-making when selecting a new provider. Having that positive reputation online can make a difference in retaining and growing a patient base as an independent practice.
Physicians should focus specifically on Google reviews, as 69.3% of patients report that they are more likely to rely on Google for authentic patient experiences. One way to encourage online reviews is by implementing patient satisfaction surveys. Additionally, PatientPop, a leader in practice growth technology, data reports state that patients being asked for feedback by their providers immediately after appointments are more than twice as likely to take the initiative of submitting online reviews.
Building an online presence and optimizing the patient experience will help physicians and independent practices retain and grow their patient bases over time. In addition, patients want to ensure they will be taken care of by the physician they choose to seek care from.
Examine the Complete Patient Experience
While it might sound like an obvious patient retention strategy, keeping your patients happy is essential, especially in a busy healthcare practice with many moving parts. Many factors can impact the patient experience at any point in the patient journey, so independent practices must understand the entire patient experience from when they find your practice to post-appointment follow-up.
The patients’ top priorities include a provider who listens, welcoming staff, and a short wait time. Patients will contemplate switching providers for greater convenience, so adding tools to simplify the patient experience is a valuable investment in patient retention.
From online scheduling and digital patient registration and intake to automated appointment reminders and telehealth options, providing simple conveniences can add to a better patient experience — and, ultimately, better patient reviews.
Communicate with Patients Directly
When physicians strengthen the provider-patient connection, it goes a long way in supporting a practice’s growth strategy. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. One easy way to do this is to communicate with patients how they prefer.
Current survey results indicate that 2 out of 3 patients prefer to receive appointment reminders via text message. However, when the questions they have might be more involved—say, questions about you or your staff—nearly one-third prefer a phone call. These statistics show patients prefer human contact and communication when things get complex.
Practices can also take retention communications one step further by implementing email marketing campaigns. These campaigns can be custom-designed to increase patient engagement, provide specific information about health conditions, and share practice updates. By segmenting your patient base through email marketing campaigns, you can deliver targeted, relevant information that matters to patients while also establishing a deeper connection with patients.
Patients have an abundance of healthcare providers to choose from, and with big players like CVS, Walmart, and Amazon entering the landscape, the competition is fierce. As a result, independent practices must prioritize their online presence and patient experience. The ultimate key to success for independent practices is cultivating patient relationships over time.
The COVID pandemic hastened the digitization process of many companies. As people lean towards availing services online, many businesses realize the potential of moving to a digital platform. Doing so made purchasing more convenient for the buyers. The same can also apply to Medicare.
Recent industry articles about fixing the Medicare buying process mention that the Medicare buying system is seriously flawed. It is outdated and in need of serious reform.
Buying a Medicare plan usually takes place over the phone- a traditional agent-to-consumer relationship. However, is this the best way to sell Medicare plans?
Choosing a healthcare policy is complex, mainly because of various choices. A 15- to 30-minute phone call with an incentive-hungry agent would not be enough to cover all the intricacies of choosing a Medicare plan.
How can Digitalization Help in the Medicare Buying Process?
Accenture reports that Americans 65 and over are most likely to have used electronic health records in the last year among health technology users. Moreover, their research also reveals that people are extremely enthusiastic about virtual health and artificial intelligence. It is a wonder that most health insurers still think digital is just for the young.
Clearly, anyone surprised about seniors’ desire for digital health hasn’t been paying attention. Over the past few years, silver surfers have become a force to be reckoned with in the digital world. The healthcare system that does not embrace them as digital health consumers is falling behind its rivals. This consumer segment is experiencing a significant shift, putting these providers even further behind.
MDaudit, the healthcare technology company that harnesses the power of analytics and its proven track record to allow the nation’s premier healthcare organizations to retain revenue and reduce risk, announced today the launch of MDaudit Revenue Integrity Suite which brings fully integrated risk capabilities and supporting workflows together on a single platform.
The only end-to-end denials analytics technology designed to pre-emptively protect against revenue leakage by identifying and resolving systemic risks based on historical data and applied insights, MDaudit Revenue Integrity Suite proactively addresses the issues that lead to costly inpatient and outpatient claim denials.
“Up to 80% of denial dollars can be traced back to just 20% of denied claims – denials that are rooted in systemic issues that MDaudit Revenue Integrity Suite eradicates with a unique blend of retrospective diagnostics and predictive analytics,” said Peter Butler, president and CEO, MDaudit. “This is not just another in the industry’s long line of software that does little more than highlight coding inaccuracies without identifying the cause of denials. Rather, MDaudit Revenue Integrity Suite creates a closed-loop feedback process between insights, action, and outcomes to manage high-impact denials, making it a powerful vehicle for driving improved overall revenues.
Powered by sophisticated analytics, augmented intelligence, and expertise in providing proven revenue cycle management services and solutions to the nation’s leading healthcare provider organizations, Revenue Integrity Suite is the latest offering from MDaudit that delivers industry-leading innovation to improve outcomes through actionable analytics and empower healthcare organizations to achieve unparalleled efficiency, reduce compliance risk, and retain more revenue. MDaudit technology delivers powerful workflow automation, risk monitoring, and built-in analytics and benchmarking capabilities – all in a single integrated cloud-based platform.
MDaudit Revenue Integrity Suite gleans insights from historical data and applies them proactively to address potential denials for reasons that are either medical necessity, pricing, or treatment-related, including specialty drug and durable medical equipment (DME) utilization, thereby resolving the issues that cause high-dollar hospital claims to be denied. It features a powerful analytics engine that proactively identifies financial and clinical issues with high-value services as they are seen by payers, reducing the costliest denials and payment delays, and improving revenue and days in A/R.
By identifying, prioritizing, and addressing denial risks that have the greatest financial cost, MDaudit Revenue Integrity Suite optimizes and targets internal resources for maximum impact. It also:
Provides greater visibility of revenue risks across revenue integrity, revenue cycle, billing compliance, coding, clinical documentation, and other teams.
Supports improved financial decisions, forecasting, risk management, and strategic use of internal resources.
Informs retrospective and prospective audits, driving continuous billing compliance, coding improvements, and stakeholder education.
“In today’s macro-economic environment, healthcare organizations are necessarily hyper-focused on achieving sustainable revenue and profitability,” said MDaudit COO Ritesh Ramesh. “Their needs drive MDaudit’s continuous search for technology-enabled approaches to ensure these organizations can keep the revenue they earn with greater predictability and less risk.”
He continues: “MDaudit Revenue Integrity Suite tackles this critical problem with an innovative, data-driven, and cross-functional approach that exceeds the capabilities and ROI of the traditional solutions in this space.”
The horizon of healthcare mobile application development is expanding through limitless boundaries after the world hits the massive pandemic. Even though it’s the era of tech evolution, healthcare mobile application development has followed an impactful drift. Following the link, you can find the most detailed article by Topflight Apps on this topic.
If you’re curious to dwell on the running subject and know how to build a medical app, here’s something fascinating for you:
Why is Healthcare Mobile App Development Necessary?
The attainable fitness goals and a patient-centered healthcare approach are the two main reasons compelling the developers to build healthcare applications.
The benefits of adhering health care services to mobile applications are numerous, whereas a few are discussed below:
If you create a medical app, your services won’t be confined to patients; these apps are equally beneficial for healthcare workers and physicians.
Building a health app not only makes patients stay updated with their health progress but also keeps track of their lab tests side by side. Thus, consistent monitoring also suggests timely lab testing (Blood CP, LFTs, etc.)
Some healthcare apps also facilitate patients’ dietary uptake according to their ailment or particular health condition.
A patient-physician communication plays a critical role in developing a diagnosis. Medical apps have a profound impact on the said subject.
Data kept in the digital record is easy to transfer for clinical review purposes and is retrievable at any time.
Types of Healthcare Mobile Applications – User-Based Classification
If you’re searching for tried and tested ways how to create a health app, then make sure you’re entitled to any of these types:
LinkedIn is a real asset for health professionals, especially in the post-COVID-19 period. It is an excellent commercial lever for companies, particularly those in the health sector. You should create the perfect LinkedIn profile to stand out.
If you don’t know how to go about this, there are different companies specializing in writing linkedin profiles that you can hire and have yours perfectly crafted. To craft the perfect profile, it is more beneficial to know each LinkedIn tip and how to use this social network correctly. So let’s take a look at some specifics together.
Is LinkedIn still an essential network for healthcare professionals?
This professional social network is still essential for healthcare players and their marketing strategies. First, the professional page on LinkedIn now serves as a showcase for companies. Users should find all the most important information there.
LinkedIn also allows marketers to effectively promote content where professional exchanges are encouraged. For health professionals and industrialists, it is interesting to share articles concerning the medical field and to target professionals in this sector.
LinkedIn tip to improve your professional page
Optimizing your professional page to showcase your business has become a necessity. This must be just as neat as the website because aesthetics and clarity are vital points. Nowadays, your LinkedIn account can be a guarantee of your image. It must be attractive while remaining professional. However, do not forget to respect the ethics of health professionals because this sector has many standards and regulations.
LinkedIn tip: for the practical side, we have listed a few points to take into account to optimize your company page:
The convenience of telehealth, both for the medical professional and the patient, is a strength that can’t be overstated. Telehealth, or telemedicine, empowers patients to have better access to quality care at more affordable prices. As a result, telehealth and telemedicine have seen a sharp increase in use and popularity over the past few years.
There are many explanations as to why that uptick has occurred, from the practice becoming routine during the pandemic, an increase in access to more technology, and a demand for more convenient, affordable healthcare.
