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Shifting gears in the new era of high-deductible plans

By Briana Pierce, Director of Patient Services at Children’s Eye Physicians

Transformation happens continually, sometimes right under our feet.

For instance, today I can purchase my groceries online and have curb-side assistance when I pick them up. Having groceries loaded into my car and the charge hitting my credit card later that night is a big change from when I used to go grocery shopping with my mom as a child, and we spent about an hour rolling up and down the aisles, and paying in person with a check or cash.

Similarly, shifting payment models in our Denver-based specialty practice — which serves 35K patients annually facing pediatric ocular disease — left us with the challenge of managing a decrease in commercial insurance reimbursement and a spike in patient accounts receivable (AR).

Getting a handle on patient collections was a top priority for our revenue cycle team, so we added a benefit coordinator and started looking into patient payment technology to help us collect payments up front at the time of service. Concurrently, we were also rethinking our clearinghouse vendor and knew we could gain efficiencies by addressing both revenue streams from the same company.

That’s when we turned to Waystar. Impressed by its complete revenue cycle management platform and robust customer service, in 2015, we implemented Navicure® ClaimFlow™ (now known as Waystar) clearinghouse services. A year later, we added Waystar’s patient payment solution to help with patient receivables.

In 2017, we began using the Greenlight feature — a secure credit-card-on-file (CCOF) solution — to collect co-pays, unpaid balances, unmet deductibles, and co-insurance after payer remittance, and we’re thrilled with what we’ve already accomplished, including:

  • Within three months since implementing the program, we’ve saved at least the cost of one full-time employee (FTE)
  • Uploading a credit card on file at the time of a patient’s visit has eliminated the need to manually fold, stuff, and send out statements; call patients to ask for payment; and gather payment information over the phone
  • In the first month alone, we were able to collect credit card information for 55 percent of our patients seen, with payment processing for those patients growing each month — as of August, we auto-collected $77,000 and our patient AR is beginning to drop

Support from Waystar has also helped build staff confidence in using the solutions and working with patients to collect payments. As trusted partners and collaborators, Waystar has tailored its solutions to better meet the unique needs of our pediatric practice.

All of this ensures we’re successfully navigating change, and ensuring a seamless experience for our patients.

 

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