6 Best Practices for Patient Payment Plans

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As healthcare providers rely more on patients for revenue, many have started to use more consumer-centric strategies, like payment plans that enable patients to pay balances off over time. Improve processes for your organization and patients by adopting best practices and policies.

A Growing Demand for Payment Plans in Healthcare

The rise in high-deductible health plans and growing out-of-pocket costs is forcing consumers to bear greater

Tagged Best Practice, healthcare payments, increase collections, patient bad debt, patient payments, patient responsibility, payment assurance, payment card, payment strategies, PCI-DSS, trends in healthcare payments

Enhance the Provider Experience: Deliver Payment Assurance

In an earlier post, we discussed one of the major threats to the payer-provider relationship: the provider’s lack of payment assurance. This threat poses an opportunity to payers to give their provider networks the tools needed to achieve payment assurance. In our previous post, we gave tips for payers to deliver payment assurance to their providers. Below, we’ve included a graphic of the Payment Assurance Framework to demonstrate how payers can deliver payment assurance to providers in each step of the healthcare

Tagged Administrative Costs, Best Practice, Claims, Clearinghouse, Eligibility, ERA/EFT, healthcare payments, patient estimation, patient payments, patient responsibility, payer-to-provider payments, payers, remittance

How to Keep Your Provider Network Happy

For a healthcare payer’s provider network, the process to get paid has always been a challenge. The steps providers take each day, from verifying eligibility and submitting claims, to receiving and reconciling payments, are filled with manual work, paper, errors and delays. As a result, the fragmented, time-consuming and often stressful process to collect payments is adding a lot of cost pressure on providers.

New healthcare reform mandates also put pressure on providers to find ways to get paid more efficiently.

Tagged Administrative Costs, Affordable Care Act, Best Practice, Eligibility, ERA/EFT, healthcare payments, healthcare reform, increase collections, patient estimation, payer-to-provider payments, payers, payment assurance, payment strategies, private cloud, providers, reconciliation, remittance

Top 3 Misconceptions of Collecting from Patients

Many healthcare providers are concerned about the impact to their businesses that will result under PPACA. Much of this concern is due to the additional 20 to 30 million uninsured Americans that will begin to receive new healthcare coverage in 2014. With more patients eligible to receive healthcare services, and hundreds of millions of patient payments transactions being added to the U.S. healthcare system, the difficulties providers face with patient collections is becoming a high priority issue.

Shifting the focus to

Tagged Administrative Costs, Affordable Care Act, Best Practice, Compliance, Consumerism, Eligibility, healthcare payments, healthcare reform, increase collections, patient bad debt, patient estimation, patient payments, patient responsibility, payment, payment assurance, payment card, payment strategies, PCI-DSS, providers

What the New EFT Regulations Mean for You

Guest Blogger: Bill Marvin, President & CEO, InstaMed

In an earlier post, I commented on the HHS interim final rule adopting electronic funds transfer (EFT) standards, which was released in January 2012. In the post, I outlined the following changes needed in order for the new EFT regulations to truly improve efficiency and deliver cost savings for healthcare payers and their provider networks:

1. Add a Trace Number Requirement

The rule should require that the EFT and the electronic remittance advice (ERA) have

Tagged Administrative Costs, Affordable Care Act, Best Practice, CAQH, Compliance, CORE, ERA/EFT, healthcare payments, healthcare reform, Medical Loss Ratio, patient responsibility, payer-to-provider payments, payers, providers, reconciliation, remittance, reporting

Why the New EFT Rule Could Have Been Better

Guest Blogger: Bill Marvin, President & CEO, InstaMed

Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a final rule adopting electronic funds transfer (EFT) standards, which are part of the ACA provisions that call for improved administrative efficiency. While this rule is just one piece of the ACA operating rules, the adoption of the rule for EFT standards lays a positive foundation for the future of both EFT and ERA (electronic remittance advice). However, a couple of serious flaws

Tagged Administrative Costs, Affordable Care Act, Best Practice, ERA/EFT, healthcare reform, payer-to-provider payments, payers, providers, reconciliation, remittance

True Availability – Part 2: Cloud Protection

Guest Blogger: Chris Seib, Co-Founder & CTO, InstaMed

Last week, I highlighted some common oversights by businesses when leveraging a private cloud that increase the risk of long-term data outages, and detailed the best practices and tips to use in discussions with current or potential vendor partners in order to protect your business. Below is Part 2 of this post, focusing on disaster recovery, business continuity and security.

Disaster Recovery

Even with high degrees of local redundancy in a private cloud data center,

Tagged Best Practice, Compliance, Disaster Recovery, EHNAC, HIPAA, HITECH, PCI, private cloud, security, SSAE 16

True Availability: Best Practices on the Cloud

Guest Bloggers: Bill Marvin and Chris Seib, Co-Founders of InstaMed

Last night, I turned on iTunes Match for the first time and streamed music from iCloud while making dinner. Using the cloud to play music worked great, but it made me wonder: what would happen if the cloud went down and my music was unavailable? For five minutes, or for five hours? I’d be annoyed and inconvenienced, forgetting all about my recent delight and the old way I used to do

Tagged Best Practice, Disaster Recovery, private cloud

Blog Post Topic: Best Practice