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Patient Financial Experience 2020
Driving Additional Revenue by Improving the Financial Experience
Author
Mac Boyter
Author
Alex McIntosh
Fostering a positive financial experience for patients—and thereby capturing a more steady stream of revenue—is critical as healthcare organizations deal with the financial uncertainty created by COVID-19 and other industry forces. This report looks closely at patient financial engagement platforms and patient financing services—two segments of the patient financial experience market—to determine how vendors compare in terms of customer satisfaction, what capabilities customers find most beneficial, and what benefits have been achieved for patients.
What Factors Impact the Patient Financial Experience?
Patient financial engagement is more than a one-off interaction, and it transcends any one touch point, such as a patient statement or a patient payment portal. Pre-service estimates, clinical reminders, printed and digital intelligent statements with personalized messaging, and tailored payment options, including payment plans, financing and financial assistance, IVR functionality, chat, and the patient payment portal—all must work together to deliver a clear picture and a clear path to financial resolution.
Patient Financial Engagement Platforms
Flywire, Patientco, RevSpring Most Established in Market; Patientco Leads with Consistent Customer Experience
Patientco, who scales across customers of all sizes and revenue levels, is described as highly engaged in making sure customers succeed and as highly responsive when concerns or problems arise. They listen to client requests and also proactively reach out with offers to help. RevSpring scales to both small and large customers, who highlight the vendor’s broad, omni-channel functionality and strategic use of print/digital statements, which have been complemented by updates to the digital platform. Clients using recent upgrades report a dramatic improvement in satisfaction. Flywire feedback comes from Flywire customers—who are mostly smaller, standalone organizations—as well as legacy Simplee customers (acquired in early 2020), who include many larger clients. The solutions deliver much of the functionality customers need and enable them to receive patient feedback regarding financial concerns.
Technology from Up-and-Comers Cedar & VisitPay Exceeds Expectations
In a market where high customer satisfaction is the norm, Cedar and VisitPay (both limited data) stand out for the strength of their technology and their customers’ high overall satisfaction. Viewed by customers as an up-and-comer, Cedar stands out for providing high product quality and value in the ambulatory market—interviewed customers praise the payment portal’s ease of use and Cedar’s flexible payment plans. VisitPay customers, who tend to be larger organizations, feel the vendor’s tools enable them to offer patients a variety of payment options, leading to increased collections.
All Vendors Meet Needs for Patient Engagement, with Patientco Excelling
Patientco customers are very happy with their vendor’s patient engagement efforts, describing Patientco as a partner that is highly engaged in improving the patient financial experience. VisitPay is highlighted for their analytics and reporting, which customers say facilitate better understanding of and better interactions with patients. Cedar customers appreciate that their technology can be custom tailored to the patient, helping improve the overall experience. Feedback on Flywire (combined) and RevSpring—the vendors with the largest, most diverse customer bases—is more mixed but is still positive overall. Customers say their technology simplifies the payment process and has been commented positively on by patients.
VisitPay’s and Cedar’s Messaging Capabilities Enable Effective Patient Connections
Customized messaging allows provider organizations to more thoughtfully and effectively connect with their patients. VisitPay customers say the vendor has worked extensively to supply them with messaging tools that cover every scenario and has helped them optimize these tools, which they describe as adaptable and functional. Cedar’s engagement platform learns the message times and cadence that will most likely yield a response from any given patient and increase that patient’s probability of making a payment. Flywire (combined) and RevSpring customers both report that their messaging capabilities meet their expectations and can be adapted to patient behavior. However, customers of both would like additional input and help from their vendor in optimizing the capabilities.
Payment Portal Seen as Most Beneficial Component of Patient Financial Experience Software
Across vendors, interviewed organizations say that a payment portal is vital to simplifying the payment process and driving additional revenue. While most portals offer similar functionality, each vendor’s portal was highlighted for specific benefits. Cedar’s portal is seen as simple to use, speeding up the payment process and enhancing patient satisfaction. Patientco customers have the ability to combine charges from different providers and facilities into a single view in the patient portal, and they say this has increased patient satisfaction. RevSpring’s solution combines bills for members of the same family into one cohesive portal view, facilitating an easier payment process. VisitPay customers highlight their self-service options within the portal, including the ability for patients to set up payments at the time of service. Payment plans are another capability viewed as beneficial. Flywire analyzes patients’ credit history and past payment behavior to create personalized payment plans that have encouraged more patients to engage.
Patient Financing Services Firms
Quality Staff and Strategic Abilities from AccessOne, CarePayment & ClearBalance Get Results and Preserve the Patient Experience
Having high-quality staff is crucial to the success of any services engagement. In the financial experience market, strategic ability (including tools, reports, and engagement methods used to drive outcomes) is also important. All firms in this report do well in both areas. AccessOne clients say the firm has a courteous, professional staff and stays abreast of engagement best practices and new technology, driving increased collections. CarePayment clients highlight the vendor’s ability to report each account’s progress and slice data in any way needed. Additionally, clients are pleased with the professionalism of the staff and how they interact with patients. ClearBalance HealthCare clients report strong satisfaction overall, praising the firm’s ability to assess organizational needs and establish clear ROI expectations. They feel the firm has innovative collection methodologies. Feedback regarding staff quality is varied—those who are less satisfied had negative experiences with staff quality in the past; while they acknowledge many significant improvements, their perceptions of the firm have not completely recovered.
AccessOne, CarePayment & ClearBalance Partner with Clients Beyond the Traditional Vendor Relationship
All client bases in this research report high satisfaction with their firm/client relationship. AccessOne clients describe their firm as a strong partner that is willing to go the extra mile to meet needs and has a strategic focus on the future. CarePayment clients say the firm often goes above and beyond to partner with them. CarePayment schedules frequent points of contact to make sure clients’ needs are listened to and acted on and to provide visibility into the firm’s collection efforts and the client’s revenue operations. ClearBalance HealthCare has partnered with clients to more proactively reach out and ensure clients’ ROI expectations are being met. Clients say ClearBalance has put increased focus on understanding clients’ needs and doing what it takes to improve their revenue collection.
Some CarePayment Clients Report Lower Perceptions of Value
None of the metrics examined above matter if real results aren’t achieved. ClearBalance HealthCare excels in driving outcomes. Clients receive more patient payments and say the firm finds ways to work with patients who might not otherwise pay. And they do this while earning positive reviews from patients. Similarly, AccessOne clients say patients view the firm not as a collections agency but as a partner who works with them to find payment solutions. Clients also feel AccessOne is up front about costs, so there is no confusion when the client organization receives the bill. CarePayment rates a bit lower when it comes to driving outcomes and avoiding charging for every little thing. While clients feel CarePayment keeps commitments (and even guarantees to hit certain financial metrics or pay the difference), a number feel the firm didn’t adequately explain costs up front, leading them to view the services as expensive. Others note that their implementation was not tailored well to their specific needs; as a result, they had to rework internal processes when they found it would be cheaper to handle some accounts themselves.
About This Report
Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT products and services their organizations use. These interviews are conducted using a standard quantitative evaluation—one for software products and one for services—and the scores and commentary collected are shared in reports like these and online in real time so that other providers and IT professionals can benefit from their peers’ experiences.
To enable readers to more quickly understand high-level differences in vendor performance and give better context as to how each product compares to other offerings in the market, KLAS has organized the questions from the standard software evaluation into six customer experience pillars—culture, loyalty, operations, product, relationship, and value.
The standard services questions are divided into five customer experience pillars—loyalty, operations, services, relationship, and value.
To supplement the data gathered with this standard evaluation, KLAS also creates various supplemental evaluations that target a subset of KLAS’ overall sampling and delve deeper into the most pressing questions facing healthcare technology today. For this report, a supplemental evaluation was used to interview software customers regarding how they use their product, why they chose their current vendor, and satisfaction questions specific to the patient financial experience market.
The data in this report was collected over the last 12 months; the number of unique responding organizations for each vendor or firm is given in the table below.
What Does “Limited Data” Mean?
Some products or services are used in only a small number of facilities, some vendors are resistant to providing client lists, and some respondents choose not to answer particular questions. Thus a vendor’s sample size may vary from question to question and may not reach the threshold of unique respondents KLAS requires for data to be shared.
When a vendor’s sample size for a particular question is less than 15, the score for that question is marked with an asterisk (*) or otherwise designated as “limited data.” If the sample size is less than 6, no score is shown. Note that when a vendor has a low number of reporting sites, the possibility exists for KLAS scores to change significantly as new surveys are collected.
Overall scores are measured on a 100-point scale and represent the weighted average of several yes/no questions as well as other questions scored on a 9-point scale.
Writer
Elizabeth Pew
Project Manager
Robert Ellis
This material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2024 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.