Mergers and acquisitions have been making the news lately – Amazon purchased Whole Foods, Verizon bought Yahoo, Coach bought Kate Spade, WalMart bought Bonobos – these strategic acquisitions allow companies to grow by launching into other markets quickly.
We’ve been seeing this in healthcare, too. Individual providers are becoming networks of providers, and even teaming up with health plans to offer comprehensive healthcare services.
While M&A can accelerate progress in some areas for healthcare, it can slow organizations down as well. When combining disparate technology systems and processes, organizations might become slower to innovate, create vulnerabilities to more security risks, and have trouble integrating data seamlessly to see real efficiency.
What can integrated delivery networks, health systems, physicians groups, and other types of consolidated healthcare networks do to keep their momentum? Start here…
Use the data you already have to integrate
Terms like integration and interoperability can sound daunting. Look for ways to use your existing data and even legacy technology to integrate processes.
Example: merge your billing and patient payment processes seamlessly by consolidating your source billing data and presenting patients a single workflow to view and pay all bills.
Never expose your systems to sensitive payment information
Combining organizations can drastically increase your PCI scope, making you much more vulnerable to a breach, not to mention the higher costs to meet compliance standards. Remove the headache from your PCI compliance program and take your systems out of PCI scope (no, you don’t need to outsource all of your billing to do this).
Find opportunities to automate billing and payment
72% of provider organizations still say that patient receivables are their primary revenue cycle concern, and patient responsibility for their healthcare bills is higher than ever before. Not only does it take a long time to collect these patient payments (more than 30 days for 73% of providers), the manual steps to process payments takes staff an average of 8 minutes for just one payment. That adds up to a lot of wasted time to collect the growing patient receivables.
Solve this problem with automation. Leverage your existing data – like your patient balance information – to do more than just print and mail a statement each billing cycle. Use this information to integrate electronic billing and payment to automate payments and suppress the printing of statements. Balances will be paid faster and your patients will thank you for the convenience.