At InstaMed, we’re proud of the innovations we delivered in 2016 that helped providers and payers collect and manage payments more efficiently and helped improve the consumer experience. At the start of a new year, we want to look at how the challenges facing providers, payers and consumers have changed or evolved, and how we can continue to improve and do more to answer the needs of our customers for simplifying healthcare payments.
Provider and payer organizations are becoming more complex and need to be able to collect payments across heterogeneous environments in order to streamline their processes. As this challenge evolves, healthcare organizations are asking how they can better organize their data for billing and reporting.
Consumers are expecting more from their healthcare payments experience, as their payment responsibility continues to rise and the payment experiences they have in other industries continue to improve. They are asking how they can simplify the way they manage healthcare bills over the course of a healthcare encounter and for other members of their family.
In 2017, we want to answer these new questions for healthcare organizations and consumers.
For Healthcare Organizations:
How can I better organize, consolidate and present billing and patient data to improve visibility for my staff?
We made some big strides toward this in 2016, but we’re not done yet. We want to continue to make data across your systems available in new, user-friendly ways to streamline the way your staff manages healthcare payments. We’ll do this by developing deeper integrations with your existing HIT systems, helping you to further integrate our robust healthcare payment solutions into your existing workflow. These innovations will be focused on the primary goal of giving healthcare organizations even easier access to the data they need to efficiently collect and manage payments.
How can I collect payments securely and efficiently in a complex environment?
Healthcare organizations are becoming more complex, as mergers and acquisitions bring legacy systems into newly formed health systems and payer organizations. However, a higher demand for interoperability creates a greater innovation with payment devices and security. In 2016, we innovated our payment technology to become the first PCI-validated P2PE v2.0 solution built exclusively for healthcare. In 2017, we are going to continue to help organizations stay ahead of the evolving payment industry with more tools to collect all payment methods in a complex environment.
For Consumers:
How can I use a saved digital wallet to manage all of my healthcare bills?
In 2016, we made exciting improvements to the ways consumers view, pay and manage their healthcare payments. These improvements included enhancing the digital wallet consumers use to manage their healthcare bills and store their preferred payment methods. It also included improving the overall look of bills, to make them easier to understand and pay. These enhancements improve the consumer experience, but the healthcare industry needs to continue to focus on meeting consumer demands for easy payments. In 2017, InstaMed plans to improve our consumer-facing payment functionality to make it even easier to manage and pay healthcare bills.
How much do I owe for all of my family members?
According to the Sixth Annual Trends in Healthcare Payments Report: 2015, nearly three-fourths of consumers want to pay all of their healthcare bills in one place. We expect this trend to grow in 2017. Therefore, we plan to develop solutions that make it easier than ever for consumers to understand and pay their healthcare bills, including giving consumers a way to have more control over their healthcare payments, which will ultimately help providers and payers get paid faster.