How Can Healthcare Providers Put An End to Painful Patient Experiences?

Healthcare providers across the spectrum face the challenge of juggling both healthcare and business outcomes. Once they enroll with a healthcare provider, patients look to their health system, medicare provider or dental service organization (DSO) to make quality care accessible and transparent, and to deliver it with efficiency and empathy. But to support the vast variety of ongoing care and servicing needs providers need to collect patient medical and insurance data and consents to ensure HIPAA compliance. COVID-19 has exacerbated these gaps, complicating and oftentimes severely limiting in-person appointments. This makes having digital, compliant and seamless patient experiences even more critical than before for providers to improve patient care, lower burden on the system, and run efficiently and cost-effectively.

Antiquated Legacy Systems Make Efficient Care Impossible

Despite great investments into digital solutions, most legacy systems currently being used by providers are limited to basic appointment scheduling and payment billing and are not built to support the variety of medical, financial and legal data that come into play for many customer-facing processes. To cover all patient needs, providers today are stitching together a patchwork of siloed digital systems to collect IDs, signatures, forms, and consents. Lack of seamless integration between them creates long, multi-step processes for seemingly simple servicing requests. And because many of these technologies still rely on legacy processes such as PDF documents and email, they make it impossible for customers to fulfill all requirements digitally - needlessly infusing paper and administrative work for staff, which compromises data accuracy and leads to non-compliance risks.

High-Friction Processes Cause Needless Pains for Customers & Staff

Digital silos and legacy processes add this burden and complexity in nearly every instance a patient needs to change or update to their medical or payer information, grant consent, or submit documents to support a request, such as:

• Change of address or medical insurance payer
• Amending insurance dependents
• Updating medical records
• Consent for medical procedures
• Consent to updated HIPAA requirements
• Releasing medical records
• Submitting receipts for a Health Savings Account (HSA), Health Risk Assessment (HRA), Transportation Security
• Administration (TSA), or Transportation Reimbursement Account (TRA)
• Assuming Power of Attorney (POA) rights for another patient
• Letter of medical necessity (LMN) - often needed if a patient is submitting a request or claim that was previously denied

Fragmented Point Solutions Hurt Patient Care & Drive Up Costs

Not having a unified digital intake process for existing patients brings friction, delay and frustration to patients who are often going through trying times and already overwhelmed with their own pain and anxiety. This can detrimentally affect both patient health and experience. For example, a patient that’s been injured in an accident is looking to their healthcare provider to complete the intake process as quickly as possible so they can move forward with treatment and get on a care plan towards recovery. Many providers today still typically email multiple forms to the patient, many of which are busy and confusing for them to complete on their own, increasing the likelihood that forms will be sent with errors or important information still missing. The provider must then ask for forms or incomplete documents to be re-submitted - resulting in long, tedious, and stressful experiences for both patients and healthcare staff. Outdated and broken patient care and servicing experiences:

• Add multiple touchpoints that fuel friction between customers and care staff
• Cause wait times and delays in delivering patient care
• Overburden back-office and customer-facing staff
• Inflate data and operational costs
• Result in errors that can cause misdiagnosis or violate compliance

Digitally Complete Patient Experience for Costs and Care

The impact of the pandemic on the healthcare system has exposed many of the gaps holding providers back from being able to scale quality care to diverse patient populations, all while ensuring compliance and focusing investment where it can make the greatest impact. Digitizing patient experiences from start to finish can massively improve all of these priorities for healthcare providers. To achieve this, the poor integration of siloed systems which create multiple touchpoints for patients must go, as does the reliance on legacy processes that only generate friction and confusion for patients, slow down doctors and healthcare professionals’ ability to treat patients, and bog down administrative staff with paperwork that could easily be digitized.

Make it Easy to Care for Patients from Anywhere They Are

Today, each and every step providers need to review and process can be captured from the device most convenient for their patients — their smartphone — from intake and medical procedures, to billing and coverage from multiple sources, to amending policies and terms. Instead of requiring customers to download multiple legacy PDF forms and bouncing them across online and offline channels, healthcare patients today can simply open an SMS or email link from wherever they are on their smartphone, where they can simply tap and swipe through each step they need to complete in one intuitive, real-time interactive digital session, including eSignatures, ID verification, document collection, and digital consent of terms and conditions.

A Digital Platform for Secure & Easy Patient Engagement

With one secured and unified hub that captures all patient medical and payer data, consents, and billing information, providers can collect all that’s needed to process and turnaround patient requests, all while ensuring 100% compliance with HIPAA regulations. By minimizing the need to collect and process paper documents, healthcare providers can drastically cut time and resources wasted on admin work for both clinical and non-clinical staff and re-allocate them towards enhancing care and business objectives. Allowing patients to complete all of this on mobile tremendously accelerates the process and allows providers to deliver the convenience and speed needed by today’s consumers - helping build happy, healthy and loyal patient relationships.