Make the most of new opportunities in the industry

The rise of the Healthcare Savings Account

In today’s economic climate, many employers are moving towards high deductible insurance plans in an effort to keep costs down. High deductible plans require patients to pay a generous portion of their health care bill before the insurance company will begin to kick in payment, which means that healthcare providers are seeing a greater percentage of their receivables coming from patient payments. As a result, effective methods of collecting from patients have become a critical focus for healthcare offices everywhere.

High deductible plans are often paired with a Healthcare Savings Account (HSA) to offset the patient’s financial burden. In the HSA model, patients put money into a tax-free account to either accumulate or be used during the year. Patients then use an HSA debit card to make healthcare purchases from the funds accumulated in their has account.

Patients as the primary payer and collection issues

Typically, a provider will not know the status of a patient’s progress toward their deductible at the time of service. When that client leaves the office, they do not know how much of the service cost the patient’s responsibility to pay is. Later, it will be up to the medical biller to collect the remaining portion of the bill from the patient.

Patients are going to be more likely to pay in a timely way if you make it easy for them to use an HSA debit card to pay the provider. Accommodating HSA debit cards through online payment mechanisms, phone payments, or mail-in card payments is increasingly becoming the standard.

Furthermore, because the balances on high deductible plans may be higher than patients are typically used to paying for themselves, they may need assistance with a payment plan to pay down their balance. This will particularly be the case for those patients that do not have an accompanying HSA or need to supplement their HSA funds from other sources.

Opportunity for medical billers

For the medical biller, this situation presents an opportunity to obtain the right payment product mix to provide superior payment options for your customers.

Your customers rely on you to manage the billing relationship with their patients and process the steady inflow of payments to their practices. Your ability to provide these services in a fast, accurate, and responsive manner is what sets you apart from the competition.

Free case study on how TotalTransact works for Alta Medical Management

The TotalTransact system is optimizing the collection process and strengthening customer relationships for many medical billers right now. One such company, Alta Medical Management, was able to increase online payments by 40%.