Booher, center, with her practice colleagues. She says that a few simple changes dramatically enhanced the patient experience and substantially decreased account receivables.
By Megan Booher
June 21, 2023
Many factors play a role in determining the level of comfort and care our patients experience within our facility. As patient coordinator, I pay attention to how long our patients are in our office, along with how smoothly their appointment goes. These are two key points we focus on to improve patient care and how well our office runs.
Here are a few changes that enabled us to enhance these critical areas of our patients’ experience with us, including how we freed up significant staff time in the process and increased profitability. Implementing the following two changes helped us reduce account receivables 83 percent over last year.
Use of Technology to Quickly Provide Patients with Insurance Information
We use a self-service portal to obtain insurance beneficiary eligibility, claim status and other needed information. There are multiple technologies in this area to choose from. The one we use is NGSConnex.
This technology benefits patients because it allows us to quickly give them information about their coverage and payment for services. The website allows our staff to accurately and efficiently verify insurance coverage on patients who use Medicare and supplemental insurance. By relying on the information provided by the system, we can obtain a more accurate assessment of the patient’s financial responsibility for the visit. As we are preparing information on patients for the next business day, we can enter the demographics of a specific patient and the Medicare ID number to see if they have coverage through Medicare.
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The technology also allows us to search for supplemental coverage if a patient is unaware of their insurance provider. With this technology, if you do not have the Medicare ID number, you must have the full social security number of the patient you are working with as that gives you the ability to search for the Medicare ID. Use of the technology is inexpensive and allows for our patient management and billing teams to quickly send statements. This allows statements to reach their destinations fast, and as a result, for payments to reach us more quickly.
The NGSConnex website has paid versions of the platform that can be used for extra features that do not necessarily apply to our office, so we use the basic option that is free to use for Medicare providers.
The setup process is as simple as a staff member making a login for the platform, and it only takes a few moments to search for patients’ benefits information. An increase in receipts has made us aware that this was a beneficial implementation for our practice and staff. Staff time calling for outstanding balances has been reduced by approximately eight hours per week.
Online Appointment Scheduling
Our optometric alliance, Vision Source, has a partnership with 4PatientCare, online scheduling technology, that allows us to use the service at no cost to our practice. This technology allows patients to see the openings with any doctor in our office who has availability. Patients who do not have the time or ability to come into the office, or call to schedule, can do so at their leisure.
This has given the patient management team extra time to handle other duties in their daily tasks, such as helping patients in the optical or supporting the doctor in the exam room.
Our staff regularly monitors newly scheduled appointments. It only takes a few minutes of our staff time to verify and update any information in our EHR system that patients provide. Since implementing this resource, our patient care team has noticed a slight reduction in call volume that allows for time spent elsewhere and more appointments being scheduled. Over the first quarter of 2023, we had 76 patients schedule appointments online. The length of an average phone call to schedule a full eye exam in our office is around eight minutes, which saved our staff around 10 hours that quarter that were redirected to patient care as a result!
Checking for Outstanding Balances When Patients Pick Up Orders
When a patient picks up an order, our patient coordinators look in the patient’s account to ensure that they are caught up on balances that may be due. Implementing this concept was an efficient way to collect those balances, and it can create a more seamless transition when we hand the patients off to the dispensing department after their exam. This leaves the opticians with time available to help the patient with adjustments or even another order!
Afterward, the patient is not required to take time when they are finished in the dispensing department and can leave. Checking for a balance in the beginning also allows us to familiarize ourselves more with patients and address any other concerns the patient may have while they are here between appointments. This practice saves us time in making phone calls, and it saves us money on sending statements for balances and collections if a patient will not pay. The less time we worry about collecting money, the more time we can ensure our patients are taken care of.
Different changes can create different experiences for patients. Having a staff that is willing to implement these changes is essential to creating a successful environment, not just for patients, but for the practice as well.
Megan Booher is the patient coordinator at Drs. Sehy and Jones Optometrists in Effingham, Ill. To contact her: mbooher@sehyandjones.com
