Simplifying patient billing not simple

Patient billing and explanation of benefits documents frequently baffle both patients and providers alike. This confusion impacts providers’ ability to collect on patient bills, so some providers are trying to simplify patient billing for patients in an effort to increase their debt recovery.

“There’s no other industry that has as complicated a billing process as healthcare,” said John Talaga, vice president of healthcare at doxo, a company providing an online filing cabinet for patients to group their billing information.

[See also: AMA: Patients pay 24 percent of bill]

Eight hospitals in the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council (MCHC), a membership service association of more than 170 hospitals and healthcare organizations, have been trying out doxo’s service. The program is designed to dramatically reduce the complexity patients face with medical bills, payments and EOBs.

“One of the central challenges of healthcare is that patients need to deal with multiple providers and their health insurer for episodes of care,” said Carl Pellettieri, principal, Impact, a MCHC company. “This initiative tackles that head-on, by creating a coordinated financial and administrative experience across providers and health insurers on doxo.”

“I think we have an obligation and people know that they do have out of pocket expenses relative to their healthcare services, but how can we make that as easy as possible on patients?” said Richard Nagengast, director of patient accounting, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, one of the MCHC’s members.

Making billing and EOBs easy for patients so that ultimately, providers get paid what is due to them, is an ongoing struggle. Doxo’s service is just one solution that has cropped up to potentially ease the way.

[See also: 5 headaches to avoid in billing]

Another option is not a product but a project.

Since 2000, the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Patient Friendly Billing project has provided the nation’s hospitals and health systems with information, educational programming and practical tools to aid efforts in streamlining financial communications and optimizing billing and payment functions.

“As patients become responsible for a larger portion of their hospital bills, it becomes increasingly important that they understand their expected out-of-pocket costs and resolve how they will handle their medical bills before they incur the costs of services,” said Richard Gundling, vice president healthcare financial practices at HFMA.

“The lack of interfaces between providers, payers and patients has made effective communication very difficult,” said Gundling. “But as customer-facing and back office technologies continue to evolve, the patient experience will improve.”