Baptist Memorial Health Care Enhances Patient Collections with IVR

Giving patients the option to pay medical bills how they want to has become increasingly key to optimizing patient collections.

Patients already owe more out of pocket for their healthcare than ever before, and that burden is only increasing. In fact, new data from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that the burden of deductibles has increased by a total of 111 percent across all covered workers in 2020 due to an increase in both the number of workers enrolled in plans with deductibles and the average deductible amount.

Saddled with more patient financial responsibility, patients are seeking new ways to pay their providers. But many patients have found traditional patient collection processes to be archaic and providers have struggled to modernize bill pay options while ensuring accurate account management.

Baptist Memorial Health Care, however, has uncovered a way to address both of those challenges.

A new interactive voice response (IVR) system is allowing patients of the 21-hospital system in the Mid-South to make a payment via phone at any time even after the billing office has closed for the day. At the same time, the IVR system integrates with the EHR to streamline payment posting after hours.

“Patients have more out-of-pocket expense, so there's more to collect in the self-pay arena now,” Jennifer Walen, the system director of revenue cycle at Baptist Memorial Health Care’s Central Business Office, said in a recent RevCycleIntelligence interview. “Giving patients the opportunity and the venue for many different ways to pay that bill and pay it during non-traditional business time was really important to us. This gives them another venue to do that.”

Through the IVR system from patient payment technology company Patientco, patients who call in are prompted to bypass a health system representative if they wish to pay a medical bill over the phone. The system can then take the patient’s card, whether it be a credit or debit card or for a health saving and flexible spending account.

The IVR system also supports full and partial payment workflows.

The system’s integration into Baptist Memorial Health Care’s Epic EHR system has been a major benefit for the health system and its central billing office.

“As soon as those payments are run through the Patientco system, they post live within a couple of minutes, right into Epic, so it's immediate,” said Shannon Burnham, director of billing at Baptist Memorial Hospital’s Central Business Office. “We can see it right and there is no delay with patients or with team members or other departments being able to see those posted payments.”

Integration with the EHR system played a major role in Baptist Memorial Health Care’s decision to work with the vendor and eventually turn on its IVR functionality.

Patients have also really taken to the IVR system, added Burnham.

“In the first week of implementation, we had 399 patients that called in and chose to not talk to a person and use the IVR instead, and the statements just started going out that week, so some of them were using it even before they saw it on their statements,” Burnham stated.

Since then, the health system’s revenue cycle team has observed “a steady stream of patients every day using the IVR,” according to Burnham.

Reducing call volume is important to a large health system, especially during a pandemic.

More people do not have stable health coverage because of pandemic-related job losses, new research has shown. In the first half of 2020 alone, nearly half of working-age adults did not have stable coverage and many of these adults reported challenges with paying off medical debt.

Call volume is typically already high because of Baptist Memorial Health Care’s size, but volume increased significantly during the most recent COVID-19 pandemic. More patients were calling the health system to learn about their payment options now that they were out of work or were facing financial hardship as a result of the pandemic.

The revenue cycle team wants to connect with these patients, explained Burnham and Walen. But high call volumes for other concerns, such as medical bill payment, can clog the phone lines, especially when there is only one area that handles the entire call volume for the whole health system.

“The IVR has given us the ability to reroute those calls to different avenues to not only help us, but to help the patient,” Burnham explained.

With the technology, patients who just want to pay their medical bills can easily do so without speaking to a team member, while those who truly need more assistance with patient financial responsibility can reach a person more quickly.

Additionally, with lower call volumes, revenue cycle staff have the capacity to reach out to patients who aren’t calling the health system despite having evident challenges with paying their patient financial responsibility.

“For us, with staff not being as tied to the phones as they had been, they have the opportunity to really reach out to patients that we're not able to get to,” Burnham said. “The IVR gives us an opportunity to talk to them, let them know that we're concerned, we want to understand what's going on, and we want to help them.”

Increased communication between the health system and patients gives the revenue cycle team the ability to showcase other aspects of its patient collections strategy, including new payment plan options during the pandemic.

“We know that everyone is struggling financially right now, especially in our area because not all businesses are back to 100 percent,” Burnham stated.  “There are still people who have reduced hours or are still not back to work yet. We are modifying what we can do to better help them, while also keeping our revenue stream going.”

Moving forward, Baptist Memorial Health Care plans to build on its patient collections strategy, tweaking when necessary and making it more accessible to patients.

“We're trying to have as many options for them as we can and make it a little more convenient for them, while making sure that it still works well for us,” Burnham concluded.