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In the healthcare industry, transparency is everything — you want your patients to be as informed as possible every step of the way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen with pricing, leaving both patients and providers unsure what the final bill is going to be. That’s where Experian Health’s Patient Estimates tool comes in. With this solution, you can provide your patients with timely, accurate projections of the costs of their care either before or at the point of service. By better preparing patients for their bill, Patient Estimates helps you avoid the underpayment problems you’re likely all too familiar with, leaving you more time to focus on providing the care that really matters. The power of accuracy The pricing process in healthcare is complicated. Constantly translating the shifting policies of insurers, suppliers, and partner organizations requires a level of attention that healthcare providers are rarely able to spare. But unless you thoroughly understand all the details that go into a pricing estimate, the only thing you can really offer is speculation. And patients are stressed enough as it is; the last thing they want to worry about is whether their costs are going to unexpectedly skyrocket once the bill comes. Each projection that comes from the Patient Estimates tool undergoes several data-gathering stages before delivering any results. Patient Estimates collects information from the patient’s insurance provider, including claims history and payer contract terms, as well as the hospital\'s chargemaster price. This data is automatically posted to a centralized work list, which can be customized by a healthcare provider depending on its needs. Imagine you need a price estimate for a patient who needs a common procedure or you’re trying to pinpoint the costs of a very specific procedure. You can narrow your search in the Patient Estimates platform to match your patient’s unique situation, and then you can easily pull that pricing information back up at any time. Most importantly, this data is equally accessible for your patients — you can print estimates in a variety of languages or customize scripts for your staff to read. As altruistic as this all sounds, Patient Estimates isn’t just a way to fulfill an ever-increasing obligation of state mandates for price transparency. Getting accurate pricing estimates slashes the time you’d spend manually updating pricing lists and scrambling to create an audit trail for a patient. By automating this grunt work and providing accurate upfront information, Patient Estimates can make your collections process easy and efficient — not two words you typically associate with collections. “The tool is really behind a lot of our success with billing and quick client payments,” says the Baylor University College of Medicine’s director of patient access. “Partnering with Experian Health has allowed us to be an advocate for our patients while also protecting our bottom line.” Patient Estimates isn\'t just a useful resource for patients; it\'s also an efficient tool providers can use to avoid age-old payment problems. After all, your organization runs on payments, and you’d hate to miss out on essential revenue because you didn’t give your patients accurate information in the first place. Bundle up Combining Patient Estimates with other Experian Health services can extend the benefits across a wider range of services. Patient Estimates connects with Eligibility, for example, to generate up-to-date benefits information that can inform a patient\'s treatment plan. It also works in lockstep with our Contract Manager solution to price estimates based on a provider’s payer contract, no matter how complicated it is. The College of Medicine at Baylor University is among the providers that use Contract Manager to analyze contracts throughout clinical practice departments. After adopting Experian Health\'s product suite, the school overhauled its internal collections strategy and generated more than 18,000 patient estimates while collecting $4.2 million in contractual underpayments it would have previously missed. Baylor has used its package of Experian Health products not only to streamline its workflow, but also to improve its patient collections rate and negotiate stronger contracts. You don’t have to draw a hard line between helping your patients and making a profit. In fact, the two go hand in hand when you take the right steps. With Patient Estimates, everybody can get on the same page. Contact our team today to find out how to boost transparency in your organization. To learn more about Baylor University College of Medicine’s experience with price transparency, please download this case study.
Patient responsibility for their cost of care is rising dramatically. By 2025, it’s estimated that 20 percent of all consumer earnings will go to healthcare costs. As such, consumers are increasingly wrestling with how to navigate the healthcare journey, and providers are seeking ways to provide more transparency around costs. To dig deeper into these shifts, Experian Health conducted a study to assess the patient healthcare journey. A summary of findings were released in an all-new paper, Embracing consumerism: Driving customer engagement in the healthcare financial journey. We interviewed Kristen Simmons, Experian Health senior vice president of strategy and innovation, to learn more about the study. What prompted you to conduct this study on the “jobs” associated with the consumer health journey? In speaking with our clients and top thought leaders in the healthcare space, we are naturally aware that our industry is ripe for change. Consumers expect a more seamless, transparent healthcare journey – from start to finish – but we wanted to dig in and understand more specifically how they view each dimension of the process. What “jobs” must they tackle on their quest to getting the healthcare they need? What’s working, and where are they experiencing pain in the process? We wanted to hear directly from consumers to understand their current situation and motivations, and simultaneously assess how providers are feeling about the state of healthcare. Tell me more about the “jobs-to-be-done” methodology. Why did you take this approach to conduct your research? Consumers purchase and use products and services because they satisfy one or more important jobs they are trying to accomplish. In healthcare, this largely centers around the goal of getting better: Cure the ailment, fix the broken bone, complete the annual well-check visit. Qualitative insight into the “jobs” consumers need to get done ensures that we start with a “needs” mentality when we innovate products and solutions, rather than an “ideas-first” mentality. In our work, consumer interviews revealed 137 jobs associated with a typical healthcare experience. We then conducted a quantitative survey to measure the level of importance associated with each of these jobs, as well as the consumer’s current level of satisfaction with their ability to get each job done. These responses helped us develop a heat map illustrating the greatest pain points and opportunities for improvement. And let me tell you, there is a lot of work to be done to improve the customer experience in health! Are you surprised to see that the financial “jobs” associated with the consumer’s healthcare journey to be the most painful for consumers? I think we all knew the financial aspects of the journey would be a pain point, but it was surprising to see just how dominant this pain was ranked across absolutely every financial element of the journey from start to finish. Ninety-four percent of consumers ranked financial experiences as a major pain point in their overall healthcare journey. Additionally, 98 percent of consumers ranked worrying about paying their medical bills as a “very” to “extremely important” pain point. We need to build solutions and processes that offer consumers more transparency around the financial aspects of the healthcare journey—and importantly, help them know what to expect at each step along the way. This will alleviate some of the stresses of the unknown and allow healthcare consumers to focus on what matter most – getting the care they need. Beyond the consumer survey, you also interviewed 22 providers about their priorities for creating a better patient experience. What did you learn in these discovery calls and face-to-face interviews? Healthcare providers want to see change as well. They are obviously focused on healing people, but they recognize the need to give focus to the marketing and business aspects of providing care. They told us they want to find ways to provide more clarity around charges, and education around how charges can change along the way depending on health discoveries. They additionally cited desires to measure the customer experience, improve their IT infrastructures, build customer loyalty and even link customers with charitable organizations who can help with healthcare costs and payment. They fundamentally understand that all aspects of the consumer or patient experience is important, and some are beginning to recognize that the financial and clinical aspects of healthcare may be more interrelated than once thought. The theme of “consumerism” bubbled up in both the consumer and provider responses. Can you expand on what “consumerism” means in the healthcare space? With the rise of digital technology, consumers have unprecedented power. They expect to be provided with a turnkey, individual experience that is fast and seamless. Think Amazon. Think Apple. Think about review sites like Yelp. While other businesses have been shifting their focus toward delivering meaningful and valuable consumer experiences, healthcare has largely stayed the same. But, costs are rising for governments and employers, and this is placing pressure on healthcare organizations to think differently about how they deliver value. Those rising costs are also directly impacting consumers, driving more shopping behavior and greater adoption of new online tools and resources (think WebMD) that give them more control. These shifts mean that driving consumer engagement and redefining how healthcare organizations interact with people is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Providers need to make the customer experience a priority. Our survey results validate that, and I’m certain the expectations will only increase in the years to come as the next generations enter the healthcare arena. To learn more about the survey findings, visit Experian.com/consumerhealthstudy.
As they do with everything else they purchase, consumers demand more personalized experiences with their healthcare providers. To meet that demand, healthcare organizations have shifted how they think about customer engagement. It\'s no longer enough to bring patients in, take them through a treatment plan, and send them on their way; providers are now focused on empowering patients, treating them like customers, and using data to improve outcomes and quality of care. This shift is partly due to the fact that rising medical costs have forced health consumers to be choosier about their providers, which means those providers have to be more competitive. While this shift is relatively recent in healthcare, consumers are used to comparing companies and products before making a purchase. With that in mind, healthcare providers should take a cue from the successful marketing techniques used in other competitive industries: collecting data, using that data, and connecting with consumers to get more data. With marketing solutions from Experian Health, healthcare organizations have an easy way to leverage data and more effectively reach their current and future customers. Finding your audience The people you want to market to aren’t just patients; they’re consumers — and hopefully future customers. And these consumers have specific lifestyles and habits. The best way to learn about those habits is through a comprehensive database of consumer information. Experian Health\'s ConsumerViewSM lets you tap into more than 30 years of historical data on more than 300 million consumers. Learn exactly who your audience is by pooling data points on core demographics including age, gender, marital and parental status, and more. ConsumerView pulls from a variety of sources and is constantly being updated, which means marketers can trust that they\'re getting accurate, actionable information. After you identify your target market, you can combine the data from ConsumerView with Mosaic® USA and TrueTouchSM to segment, identify, and successfully reach your target audience with the most appropriate message. Consumer segmenting made easy While ConsumerView is the source for your audience’s data, Mosaic USA is how you make sense of it all. Think of it like an automatic filing cabinet, sorting your data into relevant groups and presenting it to you for easy accessibility. The segmentation system separates consumer audiences into 71 unique types within 19 overarching groups; more than 300 ConsumerView data points detail consumers\' preferences, choices, and habits. This segmentation helps you zero in on your audience and tailor your messages to each group you\'re targeting. Using Mosaic USA, you could identify which segments of your audience would benefit from preventative medicine or which ones are currently living with certain health conditions. Then, you could send those audience segments messages and materials about your relevant services. With the TrueTouch platform, you can ensure each message is also delivered to your audience through the channels they prefer for optimal engagement. Getting on their level Knowing who your audience members are and what they value most is an important marketing step, but you still have to deliver your message in a way that resonates with them. That might be through personalized emails, ads on their favorite social media channels, or even direct mail advertisements. TrueTouch gives you the power to personalize your marketing campaign for each unique segment of your audience according to their preferred methods of engagement. Reaching out to customers before they need to come in for a visit will make that visit more personal and productive. Your personalized marketing campaign can leverage emails, social media interaction, website retargeting, and more, depending on what\'s most effective. As your marketing campaign draws in more customers, you can continually improve your TrueTouch usage by capturing data on which channels were most effective for which customer segments. Ultimately, healthcare providers should be the most focused on providing excellent care and making customers healthy. That\'s why Experian Health\'s marketing tools are designed to make healthcare marketing as easy and as effective as possible. Today\'s consumers are savvy and choose their care providers carefully, but gaining valuable insights into their behavior is simpler than you might think.
Between 2015 and 2017, patients’ direct responsibility for their healthcare payments grew by 29.4 percent, according to a study by Black Book. On average, that left each patient with more than $6,200 in deductible and out-of-pocket expenses for the year. But patients aren\'t the only ones who have had to grapple with these changes; the shift has changed hospitals\' revenue models as well. In the same Black Book study, 92 percent of hospitals reported having trouble with collections using traditional solutions. The choice that many hospitals face is to either write off losses on late payments or pay exorbitant fees for collections agencies to pursue them all. Neither option is ideal, and for some healthcare providers, neither one is possible. Fortunately, there’s a third option that doesn’t involve pursuing all delinquent accounts — just the ones that are worth the effort. How Experian Health optimizes collections for you Experian Health’s Collections Optimization Manager is designed to help your organization sort out which patients are able and willing to pay from the ones who can’t or won’t pay. That helps you streamline the collections process and stabilize your revenue cycle. Experian Health\'s collections software does this in three important ways: 1. Segmenting patients by likelihood of recovery The first step in streamlining your collections process is to identify which patients will actually pay their bills. Experian Health\'s Collections Optimization Manager segments your patient population according to each patient\'s ability to pay, taking into account his or her unique financial situation and health coverage information. 2. Directing patients to the appropriate personnel Some accounts can be outsourced to a collections agency, while others should be directed to a financial assistance program. Using the Collections Optimization Manager to analyze your patient population helps reduce the cost of collections by showing you which type of personnel can best help each patient. 3. Keeping updated data on payment benchmarks The Collections OptimizationManager isn\'t a one-time solution; it\'s a dynamic system that continuously monitors each patient’s successful or missed payments. This data is immediately aggregated in the collections manager and kept up-to-date, ensuring healthcare providers have a real-time picture of a patient\'s financial situation. Optimized collections in action Healthcare’s patient-dependent revenue cycle is forcing hospitals and other healthcare providers to change their collections strategies. By using Experian Health\'s collections software in tandem with our other revenue cycle management solutions, you can reinvent your entire billing and collections process. It not only boosts your revenue, but also helps you provide patients with more personalized, compassionate financial options. For example, after Altru Health Systems, a healthcare provider in North Dakota, implemented Experian Health\'s Collections Optimization Manager, it identified 4,000 accounts that were eligible for nearly $2.7 million in assistance. This helped customers in need and boosted Altru\'s successful rate of collections by 114 percent by identifying accounts with a high propensity to pay. \"Partnering with Experian Health has allowed us to be an advocate for our patients while also protecting our bottom line,\" says Stan Salwei, Altru\'s patient financial services manager. \"Within 10 months of implementing, we were able to completely revamp our internal collections strategy to more effectively provide financial solutions for our patients in an ethical and compassionate manner.\" Experian Health does more than just provide the tools; we\'ll consult with you and your team personally to find the most effective ways to use them. If you have not yet implemented a streamlined collections strategy, contact us today.
When was the last time you tried a new restaurant without reading at least one Yelp review beforehand? If you’re anything like the majority of American consumers, the answer is just about never. We live in an experience-driven world, after all, and whether you’re grabbing a bite to eat or trying out a new coffee shop, reviews are a great way to set expectations. But do patient reviews operate in the same way when it comes to hospitals? The answer is a resounding yes. Research shows that higher online ratings correlate with previously established metrics for evaluating hospitals, such as lower potentially preventable readmission rates. When it comes to overall satisfaction, patients are extremely perceptive, and they’re unafraid to share their opinions — good and bad. Yet Vanguard Communications found that about two-thirds of Yelp reviewers gave the top 20 hospitals rated by the U.S. News and World Report either a mediocre or poor rating. So where is the disconnect? One explanation might be that the areas assessed by U.S. News are too narrow. For instance, a hospital might rank highly for a certain specialty, bumping up its overall rating, but at the same time, its bill-pay system could be severely lacking, souring patients’ perception of the organization. Individual hospitals have the ability to assess all aspects of patient care — way beyond the scope of a top-20 list. The onus is on you to identify areas of improvement, and the best way to uncover hidden patient pain points is feedback. And those pain points are more than just the bedside care received, but are often related on the financial experience. Creating a better experience At Experian Health, we don\'t focus on tackling every issue in healthcare; one of our specialties is helping healthcare organizations process and collect payment. However, that specific aspect of healthcare has a significant impact on overall patient satisfaction. In a recent study, Experian Health found the highest amount of opportunity for improvement is around the patient financial experience, which includes things like price transparency, understanding one’s ability for health payments, as well as options to pay for care. When it\'s easier for patients to pay their bills, they rate hospitals higher. Unfortunately, the first big obstacle in bill-pay is that patients often don’t understand what they’re paying for. Even if the quality of care was excellent, when a patient is unsure how much he or she owes, it’s all too easy to get frustrated and give a poor review. El Camino Hospital, a nonprofit hospital located in Mountain View, California, saw this problem play out with its own patients and, in response, made price transparency a major priority. Experian Health teamed up with El Camino to address this pain point. We debuted a self-service portal, allowing patients to access and manage a greater amount of data while still making account management, e-payment, eligibility, estimates, and billing information available. The most exciting element of the portal for patients and administrators alike was the addition of the patient price estimator, which gives instant estimates on a wide variety of procedures. The response to this tool was so positive that patients immediately began using it, even before El Camino promoted it. There was still room for improvement, though, so we worked to gather more patient feedback by incorporating a feedback survey into the portal. As surveys and comments rolled in, we discovered that patients were looking for a wider variety of services in the price estimator, so we’re now expanding the options. This consistent, patient-centered approach has shown tremendous benefits already. For instance, because availability to the portal is on demand, patients no longer need to directly contact the hospital for estimates, which typically results in a 24-hour waiting period. Because the call volume has greatly reduced, El Camino is now able to provide far more estimates in far less time. While El Camino Hospital\'s portal implementation is still in its early phases, other hospitals have seen impressive results with similar systems over a longer period of time. At Cincinnati Children\'s Hospital Medical Center, for example, they worked with Experian Health to revamp their online patient portal to make it more attractive and easier for patients to use. After the launch of their revised portal, online payments increased from $200,000 to $800,000, and patient billing satisfaction dramatically increased, as enrollment in their billing portal jumped from 900 to more than 45,000 families in a single year. The medical center’s patients now use the portal to ask questions of their healthcare providers, change on-file insurance information, and schedule or revise appointments. These features also reduce customer service phone calls and other related costs. The 3 steps of the patient feedback process When hospitals empower patients with access to their individual data and listen to their feedback, everyone wins. Patient feedback is essential at every level of implementing a new service to guarantee maximum efficiency. A successful patient feedback process includes these three steps: 1. Identify where feedback is needed. You don\'t need to harass patients for feedback on every single aspect of their hospital experience. Instead, look at which services would most benefit from patient insight; then, deploy surveys in those areas. Gathering feedback on high-volume services should be a priority simply because they affect the highest number of patients. Similarly, services that routinely trip patients up can only be clarified by directly asking patients what’s causing problems. At El Camino Hospital, creating the charge description master (CDM) was the first step in identifying where feedback was necessary. The list provided a convenient overview, so hospital administrators could easily pick out which services were high-volume or problematic and address them immediately. Whatever the method, pinpointing the services that are particularly troublesome for patients proves much more effective than trying to elevate the entire experience with no direction. 2. Make it multichannel. Feedback is often subject to selection bias, meaning a customer is more likely to write a Yelp review when he or she is either extremely pleased or extremely angry. Offering people several options for providing feedback increases the chances that you\'ll get a good sample size. You can gather patient feedback via polls using various methods, including text message, email, phone, and paper mail. El Camino Hospital chose to add an SMS feature, building a feedback function on its desktop interface while continuing to field phone calls regarding more complex issues. Its choice proved rewarding, and patient feedback rolled in. Limiting your feedback channels limits the amount and type of feedback you receive, so the more options that are available to patients, the more likely they will be to share their opinions and suggestions. 3. Identify patients who need help and offer it. Patient feedback is only valuable if you act on it. Once you’ve identified specific problems, reach out and offer a solution to patients who expressed concerns. In conjunction with increasing transparency, El Camino Hospital set a goal to identify and assist at-risk patient accounts. After gathering feedback and information on these accounts, El Camino integrated a medical billing fundraiser to lend a helping hand. From there, it created alerts for other at-risk accounts to spread the impact of the fundraiser. By responding to feedback, hospitals can respond to concerns before they become more serious problems, as well as anticipate patients’. If one patient encounters a problem, it\'s likely that several more will encounter the same issue — if they haven’t already. If hospitals aren\'t listening to their patients, they’re missing valuable insight into their problems and limiting their scope of improvement.
In an ideal healthcare world, third-party payers would always make payments accurately and on time. Unfortunately, human error is unavoidable, so missed payments and underpayments happen. Identifying and correcting these inaccurate payments often falls to healthcare providers, and without a strategy to make sure payers are complying with your contract terms, these errors are bound to cause stress and volatility to your revenue cycle. There are, of course, external causes of underpayment that a provider can\'t necessarily control, such as payers misinterpreting contract terms or incorrectly calculating a payment. Providers, however, can counteract this by limiting internal mistakes like incorrect billing or failure to provide appropriate documentation. Still, it’s easy to let incorrect or late payments slip through the cracks, especially without a robust contract management system. Experian Health\'s Contract Manager and Contract Analysis tools can help providers make sure they\'re reimbursed quickly and accurately. How Contract Manager and Contract Analysis eliminate payment problems Experian Health\'s Contract Manager for Hospitals and Health Systems verifies the amounts owed for all applicable claims, monitors payer compliance, and models the financial implications of proposed contracts. And because Contract Manager’s data processing and storage is completely remote, providers get 24/7 web-based access with no capital investments required and no added cost for software or data updates. Contract Manager helped Timothy Daye, director of managed care contracting and reimbursement at Duke Private Diagnostic Clinic, part of the Duke University School of Medicine, identify underpayments and discover ways to avoid them in the future. “In addition to identifying underpayments,” Daye said, “there’s tremendous value in identifying billing issues that may result in underpayments and also identifying process improvements that can be implemented to eliminate the underpayments in the first place.” Contract Manager alone can identify and prevent late payments and underpayments, but when providers pair it with its companion solution, Experian Health\'s Contract Analysis, they can find added data and negotiating power to set contract terms that optimize third-party reimbursement. Because you don’t have a crystal ball to predict how all of the hundreds of variables in third-party contracts will affect payment, you need a contingency plan. That\'s where Contract Analysis comes in. By spotting unfavorable contract terms and offering real-world “what if” scenarios, Contract Analysis tells you exactly how proposed contracts with payers might affect your revenue cycle. You’ll know before signing on the dotted line how each part of the contract will play out. The Contract Manager and Contract Analysis combination allows you to audit payer contract performance to ensure compliance and maximize revenue. You could, for example, use it to check the accuracy of a reimbursement by comparing the expected payment to the actual payment, or you could recover from underpayments by finding lost revenue with data-driven insight. Contract Manager and Contract Analysis can also help you identify unusual causes of underpayments. For instance, when Daye and his team were working on a recent anesthesia project, they had to correct a non-standard billing situation. “The payer was taking a reduction by billing the QS modifier, which is outside of the norm of standard billing protocol,” Daye says. “We changed that process through the appeal with the payer by showing documentation that the QS modifier was informational only and doesn\'t warrant a reduction in payment.\" Had Daye and his team not been able to identify this system issue, they’d still be scrambling to determine why the payment was lower than they were expecting. However, by using Contract Manager and Contract Analysis, Daye was able to pinpoint an outside-the-norm situation and correct the payment discrepancy as quickly as possible. What makes the combo unique The Contract Manager and Contract Analysis combination is essential for any healthcare provider wanting to ensure it receives payments that are accurate and on time. By using proprietary valuation logic, these tools will give you more precise insight into your contracts, giving you a solid foundation to protect against any payment problems. Experian Health reimbursement specialists even offer complete contract maintenance to make things easier. Whether it\'s a coding typo or a misinterpreted contract item, there will always be some factor that could cause a payment error. And while you can’t control some of these unforeseen hiccups, you can use Experian Health\'s Contract Manager and Contract Analysis solutions to correct them in the most reliable, efficient way possible.
Not long ago, Excel spreadsheets were cutting-edge technology. Compared to stacks of paper and rows of filing cabinets, they seemed like an efficient, cost-effective way to organize and access data. But times have changed. Now, healthcare leaders are looking at their sea of spreadsheets wanting a simpler solution. According to KaufmanHall\'s \"2018 CFO Outlook\" report, 94 percent of the senior financial officers surveyed said that their healthcare organizations supplement their main data systems with spreadsheets. In the same report, more than half of them noted the need for better data visualization and easier report creation. This scenario could not be truer for Cody Torgler, physician revenue integrity coordinator with the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. He realized that using spreadsheets was a waste of time and resources. \"It really took our follow-up staff away from what they do well,\" Torgler said. \"It was causing them to touch claims multiple times. Every time you touch a claim [that needs more attention], that\'s taking money away from a claim that you might be able to get reconciled.\" How did Torgler\'s team solve its spreadsheet struggles? They saved time, money, and headaches by implementing a contract management system that monitors payer compliance with contract terms, value claims, and audit remittances based on the latest payment rules and adjudication logic. The hospital\'s new system provides regular updates to staff on claims and offers visualization and more easily searchable data. Staff members can navigate their database by grouping attributes, filtering, or generating reports. \"The sky\'s really the limit with being able to find these variances, get these variances to the payer, and get them reconciled on time,\" Torgler said. The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics realized something other providers are coming around to as well: With better systems available, it\'s time to say sayonara to spreadsheets. Shake off spreadsheets and experience Experian For healthcare organizations that are ready to move past spredsheets, Experian Health offers a series of seamless data management solutions: 1. Claim Scrubber Spreadsheets get messy quickly. They\'re often maintained by multiple users, with different people entering data according to their own preferences. A less than immaculate spreadsheet might not seem like a big deal — until it comes time to fill out claims forms. That\'s when problems tend to snowball. Incomplete or inaccurate claims forms lead to undercharges and denials, wasting your team\'s time and effort. Experian Health\'s Claim Scrubber ensures every claim is clean. Even better, it\'s automated. Instead of wading through piles of spreadsheets, your staff can spend more time helping your healthcare customer. 2. Contract Manager and Contract Analysis Excel works in a pinch for records storage, but it\'s not great at keeping track of all the details of a patient\'s contract. Small fields with overflowing text can leave out important information and make it tougher for providers to see opportunities for negotiation. Experian Health\'s Contract Manager and Contract Analysis is like an automated contract lawyer. It helps healthcare organizations validate the accuracy of reimbursements, recover underpayments, negotiate better payment terms, and even evaluate potential lines of business. The bottom line? These tools leverage the best data to provide peak contract performance. Torgler\'s team at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics uses the Contract Manager to stay on top of the hectic process of claims verification. \"With the claim count that we have at the university and the volume that we have, Contract Manager has made the transition from the Excel documents to check expected amounts seamless,\" Torgler said. \"The success of Contract Manager has allowed us to really grow at the university.\" 3. Patient Estimates Whether they\'re in for an annual checkup or open-heart surgery, patients like to know how much they\'re going to pay. But poor estimates are frustrating for everyone involved, and estimates based on a few rows of spreadsheet data are bound to be inaccurate. Only when patients are armed with the right estimates can they make informed decisions about what services they can afford. To provide accurate estimates, Experian Health\'s Patient Estimates tool relies on robust and continuously updated data. A spreadsheet might be able to hold information about a patient\'s claims history, contract terms, and insurance benefits, but why bother? Experian Health\'s tool gathers all that data automatically to issue top-notch estimates without unnecessary hassle. 4. Payer Alerts Once you close Excel, the information on a spreadsheet can\'t help you; it just sits there. Wouldn\'t it be nice to receive notifications whenever an insurance provider\'s payment policies or procedures change? That\'s why Experian Health\'s Payer Alerts keeps you current with an enormous range of payers. Information from more than 50,000 webpages run by more than 725 payers continuously feeds into the system, which then issues updates and distributes them via email and an online portal. With Payer Alerts, your organization will never be left out of the loop. The healthcare landscape is complicated and constantly changing. Spreadsheets just can\'t keep up any longer. Experian Health\'s data-driven solutions can ensure your organization doesn\'t get left behind. Schedule a demo with Experian Health today.
Experian Health will be at HFMA ANI again this year–booth 1025–at the Venetian-Palazzo Sands Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kristen Simmons, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Innovation, Consumer Experience, and Marketing, with Experian Health, chatted with Joe Lavelle of IntrepidNOW to provide her insights on this year’s HFMA ANI conference, consumerism in healthcare and much more! Excerpt below: Experian Health booth activities \"[In our booth this year at HFMA ANI, we want to focus] around peer to peer learning and exchanges, so we are doing less selling and more engaging and more understanding. Understanding folks problems and helping to collectively arrive at solutions. We are doing a lot this year in terms of hands on demos of our solutions. We\'ll be showing some of our patient engagement products which include, self-service portals and mobile options for getting price estimates for applying for charity care, and setting up payment plans. Likewise, on the revenue cycle management side to automate orders with patient access functionality, contract management claims and collections, all those types of things that we do to improve efficiency and increase reimbursement for our clients. We\'ll also be showing off some of our identity management capabilities to match, manage, and protect patient identities so we can safe guard medical information and reduce risks for our clients. And on the care management side, our early support and sharing of post acute patient care information to help providers succeed as we all move forward into a value based paradigm.\" How Experian Health is addressing the need for consumerism in healthcare \"When it comes to consumerism, it\'s interesting when you\'re a company that has a lot of data and a lot of capabilities to say, \'Hey what can we do for people?\' One of the things we really wanted to look at for our consumer approach, was to say, \'What is it that needs to be done?\' We had some great hypotheses coming in and a lot of those were borne out but we actually undertook a big national study to take a look at what consumers biggest pain points were. It has a qualitative and a quantitative component. But, we basically looked at the entire healthcare journey so we weren\'t just asking them about the administrative and financial aspects of care, but also the clinical aspects. As we walked through the journey and were able to get a lot of quantitative data about all these different aspects of their healthcare journey, what actually turned out to be the most painful for the most people, were all the things around the financial equation. And, so clearly there can be pain in a clinical side, especially if you\'re unhealthy, you\'ve got something chronic, you\'ve got something terminal. There\'s all kinds of awful situations there but, really affecting almost everyone is a lot of the pain around the financial aspect of healthcare. So, we were able to look closely at some of those pain points and decide on some of the biggest ones that we wanted to tackle.\" How Experian Health is helping providers address financial pain points for patients and providers \"Some of the big pain points for people is just the fact that you don\'t know what you\'re going to owe and as the patient portion of responsibility increases, understanding what you\'re going to be paying becomes more and more important to a consumer. So, understanding what I owe earlier, being transparent, and then helping me pay, those are some of the areas. And there are others but those are some of the absolute biggest pain points. And as you pointed out with some of our propensity to pay analytics, and some of the other capabilities that we have, we\'re able to help providers understand the financial situation patients are in much earlier in the process so they can get them to the right kind of funding sources. They can give them peace of mind so that they know what they\'re paying upfront, which may impact when they choose to go in for a major procedure or how they might want to save up for it or how they might want to access different funding sources.\" Listen to the full podcast
There\'s no question that portals increase patient engagement. According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, almost eight in 10 patients appreciate the improved access to healthcare information afforded to them by self-service systems. Unfortunately, portal systems also offer an obvious target for healthcare hackers. Within a patient portal, criminals can steal medical identity data, which is worth somewhere between 20 and 50 times as much as financial data, such as credit card numbers. They then use the stolen information to submit fraudulent claims, fill prescriptions, and resell medical equipment. What\'s more, because many healthcare organizations lack proper detection tools and some patients neglect to check their explanation of benefits (EOB) statements, health data breaches tend to go undetected longer than those in other sectors. No wonder healthcare data security incidents rose 211 percent in 2017, according to the 2018 \"McAfee Labs Threats Report.\" Protecting patients\' data with technology Patient portals engender patient engagement and loyalty, but if a data breach occurs, that loyalty is quickly lost. Besides losing patients’ trust, healthcare organizations that experience a data breach face potentially severe HIPAA penalties. Healthcare firms can learn a great deal from how other industries have met similar security challenges without overburdening consumers. Providers can use best-in-class technologies, data and analytics systems, and their deep understanding of patient needs to manage risks and protect patient identities. To arm providers against breaches, Experian Health offers Precise ID® with Digital Risk Score to protect portal users’ identities from their first sign-in to their last. By automating the portal signup process, it stops false enrollments at the source. Then, using multilayer verification, it provides access protection for future sessions. Because Precise ID takes less than a second to evaluate access risks, patients don\'t need to sit through loading screens. On the provider side, Precise ID satisfies the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services\' Promoting Interoperability standards, minimizing compliance risks. At a time when one in five patients withhold information from physicians because of data breach concerns, Precise ID builds trust between patients and providers by protecting patients\' data from unauthorized access. Giving patients the power to access their medical information through portal technology has been one of the past decade\'s biggest steps forward in improving patient-provider relationships. But with that reward comes responsibility: Providers must protect portals from unauthorized access and theft of medical records. With Precise ID with Digital Risk Score, providers get the security they need, and patients get the seamless access they\'ve come to expect.
