Practice Management Alert

4 questions to ask before you take the plunge.

Unless you’ve been under a rock lately, you’re hearing more and more about mobile patient engagement, but what’s it worth for your practice? It could be, especially if you spend a lot of time and money collecting out-of-pocket payments.

Mobile patient engagement is worth considering because it potentially enhances the patient experience—those elusive, hard-to-measure elements that affect how current and prospective patients perceive your practice online, how many referrals your practice gets, how quickly your patients pay out-of-pocket bills, and whether your practice prospers long term.

Patient engagement technology alone can’t improve patient experience. The first essential element, of course, is the clinical aptitude of your doctors and staff. But that alone doesn’t leave patients feeling satisfied, cautions Gregory Blaha, MD, PhD, who presented at AAO’s recent annual meeting. Patients also must feel their emotional needs are being met. A customer-friendly environment and processes, compassionate and caring staff, explanations about their care, and the feeling that someone is there to resolve problems can help meet those emotional needs, Dr. Blaha says.

But a busy medical practice staff doesn’t always have the time to meet those emotional needs, and that’s where mobile patient engagement solutions can potentially help. Automated tools such as appointment reminder text messages, mobile patient portals, and other tools can free your staff from routine tasks so that they can pay more attention to more attention to face-to-face communication and non-routine telephone calls.

Here are four questions to help you decide whether mobile patient engagement technology can benefit your practice:

1. Are your current and prospective patients ready for mobile engagement? Don’t assume they aren’t ready just because they are older, experts caution.

Yes, there is less demand for mobile solutions among patients in the Silent Generation (born prior to 1942) and among Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960). However, there are signs that demand is increasing as patients learn to communicate digitally with their airlines, their hair salons, and even larger health systems that are farther along in the patient engagement journey than your medical practice is. Consider this:

• 61 percent of patients agree that an electronic patient portal improves their relationship with their physician, according to a 2016 Medscape survey.
• 74 percent of patients agree that having easy electronic access to their health data would improve their health literacy, i.e. their knowledge of their health and how they communicate with their doctor, according to a 2015 HealthMine Survey.
• 62 percent of smartphone owners reported using their phone to look up information about a health condition, according to the Pew Research Center.
• 15 percent of the Silent Generation now sports wearables like FitBits, Apple Watches, and other mobile health tools, say three HIMSS, Medscape, and WebMD researchers who presented “Genera­tional Factors in Patient Engagement” at HIMSS16.
• Baby Boomers who have signed up for patient portals are using them for lab results (77 percent), communication with their providers (44 percent), refills (42 percent), and scheduling (38 percent), according to the HIMSS16 presenters.

2. What are other providers in your area doing about mobile engagement? Are larger health systems in your community resetting expectations for smaller practices like yours? What about competing practices in your specialty? Are you trying to attract new patients and grow your practice or are you pretty happy with the volume of patients you have now?

3. Will the cost of mobile engagement solutions be worth it? How much time does your staff spend on routine tasks like contacting patients for appointment reminders and calling in prescriptions? How do cancellations and no-shows affect patient flow and your practice’s financial performance? Identify the tasks that could be done just as or more effectively via mobile content, so that you can spend time on tasks of higher priority and bigger payoff.

4. Can your EHR vendor offer easy, affordable solutions? Your vendor may be able to activate the mobile features built into the EHR, making it simpler and cheaper for you to take the plunge.

Does Mobile Engagement Have an RCM Upside?

With the rise of high-deductible health plans (HDHPs), more and more money is coming out of pocket and front and back office staff are spending more and more time collecting that money. Could mobile engagement save you money on billing and collections.

Yes, says one large provider that was an early adopter of patient engagement technology. Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston recently overhauled patient engagement at its 212 locations. Chief Revenue Officer Ron Wachsman spoke at HIMSS16 and described these benefits for his health system’s revenue cycle.

You can make insurance reimbursements and patient billing simpler and more transparent with good patient engagement systems. Patients who feel positive about your practice’s billing are 41 percent more likely to pay all of their bills, and 37 percent more likely to return to the same provider for another service, says Wachsman, citing a Connance study.

If you make it easy for patients to use “self service” options, you reduce the time your staff must spend collecting insurance information, sending bills, and collecting payments. Once Memorial Hermann updated patient engagement, it lowered cost per post-service transaction by 27 percent and increased total patient collections by 17 percent. The health system was able to reduce money it had previously paid to third-party collectors, Wachsman adds.

Tip: To encourage your patients to try self service options for the first time and use them again and again, choose systems with simple, direct language and clear, patient-friendly layouts. Offer flexibility, like the ability to set up payment plans online.

Email reminders can save on collection costs. When you obtain patient emails, it’s cheaper to send payment requests because you don’t have to spend money on paper and postage. If your email reminders contain a link to self-service payment portals, you will collect outstanding A/R faster, Wachsman predicts. Email reminders also solve the “age-old confusion of all the paper bills and duplicate statements that pile up after an episode.”