Challenge: The Uphill Battle in Patient Billing
As many in the healthcare industry recognize, medical testing laboratories often struggle to collect owed balances from patients. Labs typically collect only 20% to 30% of patients’ financial responsibility, based on their insurance plans. With the trend of increasing deductibles, the challenge of getting balances paid by patients has only become even more severe in recent years, impacting lab profitability.
Pinnacle Services Corporate, a leading Houston-based medical billing consultancy and solutions provider recognized these common challenges and set out to either build or license a comprehensive A/R management platform that could cater to the specific needs faced by labs and other healthcare providers.
The chosen solution would need to have highly customizable, multi-channel collection capabilities as well as the ability to handle advanced billing and a complete set of API endpoints for building out tailored solutions for Pinnacle’s clients.
Invoiced: Full Digitization of Billing and Payments
Pinnacle Principal Vitali Khvatkov recognized the opportunity for modern billing, collections and payment technology to considerably increase patient collections within the first 45 days. But he also knew Pinnacle would need to be thoughtful in formulating a solution with the right assortment of capabilities in order to yield improvements that clients would value.
In Invoiced, Khvatkov and Pinnacle found a platform that was abundantly well-featured, volume-tested in healthcare and other industries, and extensible enough to be combined with Pinnacle’s best practices in medical and lab billing.
Key capabilities put to the test for Pinnacle clients include:
Advanced Medical Billing
With complex billing data coming from various systems, Pinnacle needed to ensure that the right line item level billing information could be efficiently imported - automatically and without error. Pinnacle made extensive use of Invoiced’s powerful import and API tools to make billing a breeze.
Multi-Channel Billing Reminders
Pinnacle new that getting the right messages to the right patients at the right moments and in the right channels would be critical for performance. Making use of Invoiced’s innovative Smart Chasing Engine, Pinnacle was able to tailor reminders via email, postal mail and text for different groups of patients.
Lab-Branded Customer Payment Portal
Patients are consumers, and consumers expect modern digital conveniences they’ve embraced in nearly every other aspect of their lives. Pinnacle was able to easily set up separate branded payment portals utilizing any number of preferred gateways for its clients. In addition to being able to pay their lab bills, patients could also download account statements and past receipts as well as view other invoices on the horizon.
Invoice & Template Customization
Because of the unique characteristics of medical billing, Pinnacle knew they would need to be able to represent different types of non-standard information on patient invoices. Invoiced allowed for custom invoice, statement and receipt formats that could be tailored to industry and client needs.
The Results: Dramatic Improvements in Billing and Payments Performance
As part of implementing Invoiced for clients, Pinnacle set out to specifically measure the difference their newly enabled solutions could make in key medical billing performance indicators.
By aiming new Invoiced-enabled capabilities at specific points of friction, Pinnacle was able to deliver several noteworthy improvements in its clients’ medical billing practices:
Increased Early Payments
By using Invoiced’s integrated reminder and payment acceptance capabilities, Pinnacle increased early patient credit card payments by 100- 150%.
Reduced Administrative Burden
In making the billing and payment experience both digital and completely self-serve for patients, Pinnacle was able to reduce requests for paper bills to less than 0.1% of patients.
Accelerated Payments Via Text & Mobile
Text-based billing drove 80% of patients with a balance of less than $50 pay online via mobile.
On-Time Collections
Participating Pinnacle clients were able to increase the percent of bills paid within 45 days by 200%.
By partnering with Invoiced, Pinnacle was able to expand portfolio of medical billing services, differentiate itself from other service providers and alternatives and deliver dramatically improved billing results for clients.