Healthcare is deeply personal for patients. It’s the most important financial transactions we have as American consumers. If fine dining, high-end hotels and VIP concerts can exchange goods and services for money without discomfort, surely, healthcare can too.
But healthcare must learn a thing or two from the industries that have mastered customer service. That’s why ensuring a quality patient experience is so critical, even and especially in the healthcare revenue cycle. Providers don’t have to avoid talking about money. In fact, effective revenue cycle management and effective patient conversations can enhance the patient experience rather than detracting from it, as many organizations fear.
Imagine going to a restaurant. The patient experience is akin to the entire dining experience, from making a reservation to enjoying the meal and paying the bill. The healthcare revenue cycle is like the restaurant’s operations, ensuring that the reservation is confirmed, the meal is prepared and served correctly and the payment process is smooth and transparent.
Now, imagine if your dining bill arrived at the table with completely different pricing than you’d seen on the menu, or that the restaurant’s own coupon was declined at the register with no explanation. Imagine your meal could only be paid for by check, or required you to stamp and post a physical stub with your payment for the night’s dining.
Just as a positive dining experience encourages repeat visits, a positive patient experience in healthcare encourages patient loyalty and timely payments — and a negative experience can build distrust and resentment, even among formerly satisfied patients.
Nothing will kill patient experience faster than getting a bill two weeks after you’ve been seen and not knowing it’s coming.
So, how can revenue cycle operators work to ensure a positive patient experience during every interaction? Different organizations approach this in different ways. Here’s Ensemble’s approach.
The Ensemble Difference
Ensemble educates every single associate on patient experience and why it matters, offering webinars and multimodal trainings on how to have positive interactions and the difference these conversations can make. Even Ensemble employees who are not patient-facing understand the necessity of ensuring a positive patient experience. Patient experience is core to our annual training, regardless of where an associate sits in the revenue cycle.
At Ensemble, we believe that great patient experience is a function of improving three components: empathy, empowerment and engagement. Addressing these ensures that patient-facing associates can communicate effectively, have the tools and processes they need to handle patients deftly and feel valued in their own roles. Increased employee engagement is tied to an improved patient experience.
Empathy
Whether inherent or learned, empathy helps associates sense and anticipate a patient’s spoken or unspoken needs. It’s about connecting at a human level and having conversations that matter. Our teams focus on empathy through effective, caring and compassionate communication at every stage of the patient experience.
Making empathetic conversations part of the daily routine, supporting financial advocacy for patients and clearly outlining benefits prevents unwelcome surprises during times with so many unknowns and will create a positive experience for patients.
Empowerment
Empowering your patient-facing teams makes a difference by improving processes, work environments and experiences. Make sure teams are all aligned on purpose as an organization; every associate should know what patient experience means and that it’s central to your organization’s mission and values. This also means documenting your approach and gaining approval from all necessary participants, so this process can be replicated again and again.
Engagement
If associates feel engaged, they are more likely to deliver a positive experience to others, including patients. Employee engagement can be fostered using open communication, encouraging stretch goals, plus personal and professional development. Management of expectations is key.
This might look like conducting engagement surveys, establishing an Employee Advisory Group (EAG), or consistently recognizing employees for their contributions. Learn more about how to engage employees and ultimately improve patient experience >>>
Empathy + empowerment + engagement = improved experience
Here at Ensemble, we infuse this approach — of leading with empathy, empowerment and engagement — into everything we do.
Every associate is trained annually on the importance and value of patient experience, and we analyze the impact of patient satisfaction on every new solution we deploy. Our engineers take the entire process into consideration, asking themselves at each stage about the hypothetical impacts of technological innovation: If we move this specific lever, for example, what’s that going to do for patients or how will it otherwise impact patients?
It’s a constant consideration — the way we define success for revenue cycle performance always includes patient satisfaction performance, since the two are so closely tied. And, in order to apply our solutions, we need to first analyze and understand how patients are engaging today and then create the appropriate interventions.
Here are specific strategies we have deployed with clients to improve both their revenue and the patient experience:
Improving the registration experience for patients
There’s a difference between implementation and adoption, and at Ensemble we’re not just in the business of implementing tools — we’re thinking about the patient experience at every step.
This is where empathy comes into play, as our associates are taught to always question: “If I was the patient, what would I want to see happen?” Because they are empowered in this way, associates often help innovate new, creative solutions that can be deployed to improve the patient experience.
First and foremost, we identify a friction point for our clients. At Adena Health, patients were waiting unnecessarily during registration, a dissatisfying experience. We proactively took the opportunity to look at how we could streamline processes and reduce that issue. To do so, we:
- Increased adoption of virtual registration (via MyChart). It’s not just about Epic, it’s about maximizing your EHR to work for you. For Adena, that required understanding the barriers in place. Then, in order to increase adoption, we first had to get patients to understand the benefits of virtual registration themselves. We did that by helping clients have the right educational information available at kiosk so patients could understand what the new process was and what was expected of them.
- Put a system for instant MyChart activation into place. Associates sat side by side with patients to help them set up their accounts. Through a combination of these efforts, Adena increased conversion rates by 35%, and exceeded its goal of 50% patient adoption within 12 months — an accomplishment even Epic commended.
- Implemented creative ideas driven by associates. The idea for the instant activation of MyChart was proposed by the patient access staff on the ground at Adena, based on their observation that many registering patients struggled with the technology. Staff also noticed that there was often a huge line waiting to register. Out of this came innovative ideas to allow for digital tools, self-check-in and even physical rerouting of patients in the on-site location. Each of these changes helped improve overall patient satisfaction, and the system saw an 80% decrease in average wait time for outpatient registration.
Improving the financial experience for patients
We see so many organizations that are hesitant to even bring up financial issues, but point of service conversations don’t have to diminish the patient experience — they can actually enhance it. Patient-friendly account resolution helps patients feel prepared to resolve their liability. Through open and transparent communication and education, we reduce continuous worries, like a patient concerned about receiving a bill in the mail after a healthcare encounter.
I think that a well-performing revenue cycle can have a significant impact on the patient experience. It’s the first interaction that a patient or a family member may have in its introduction into the hospital. Once that interaction is complete from a provision of care prospective, you’re one of the last people that our patients or families may have interaction within terms of questions on bill calls to customer service, so the functions that [Ensemble provides] are very, very important.
At Ensemble, we make sure the right tools are in place so that associates can provide relevant and accurate information to patients and drive successful collections. We provide cohesive training and education to empower these professionals to be subject matter experts on patient experience. This also means providing access to tools like a real-time eligibility tool integrated in a HIS; a patient liability estimator to provide real-time estimates on out-of-pocket liability; and thorough reporting so systems can track how far they’ve come, where their opportunities are, and where to focus future efforts.
Ensuring consistency is key. We provide process documentation and scripting for all locations and areas (ED/OP/IP) to ensure that consistent conversations are taking place regardless of whether it is a scheduled outpatient, walk-in lab or scheduled physical therapy.
We also use data to understand and identify patient issues and resolve them quickly. Whether this is done through education of staff, the creation of job aids or other ways of empathetic communicating with patients on the ground, the results prove this approach out: After implementing a POS collection program, Bon Secours Mercy Health saw a 20% increase in pre-service collections with a consistent quarterly increase in patient satisfaction scores.
When we implement patient-friendly financial processes, associates are empowered to resolve patient concerns quickly and confidently.
The bottom line
We partner with some of the best clinicians in the world who provide the best care experiences — but the logistical and financial bookends to those clinical care experiences should be just as excellent. A focus on patient experience can’t be a set-and-forget process; patients should feel that they are being heard and valued before, during and after their care experiences. We want each touchpoint to be consistent and positive.
To do this, we analyze, intervene and educate appropriately. We measure to understand how patients feel, and then we consistently outline and define solutions to address their pain points.
You can’t do revenue cycle management well without doing patient experience well, but when patient experience is done right, you get results that stretch across both the revenue cycle and patient satisfaction. We know this, and that’s why patient experience is part of Ensemble’s DNA.
By weaving empathy, empowerment and engagement into everything we do, Ensemble’s approach improves patient experience in measurable ways. One strategic end-to-end partnership with a non-profit integrated medical services provider led to greater than a 10% improvement in month-over-month patient experience survey scores. Similarly, with focused training, education and engagement, another hospital system saw a 4% increase in Top Box Scores, which measure the percentage of respondents who gave the highest response possible on the survey scale.
A focus on the patient experience is not just a nice addition to revenue cycle management; it’s fundamental to ensuring patients have a better registration experience, a better financial experience and higher satisfaction with their care all around.
