Guest Blogger: Laurie Babin, Chief Revenue and Innovation Officer at BrightSpring Health Services
I joined InstaMed to be a part of their Patient Engagement Summer Snacks webinar series to talk about the journey and results my organization, BrightSpring Health Services, experienced working with InstaMed.
BrightSpring Health Services is the new name for Kentucky-based ResCare, the parent company of a family of brands and services that provides both clinical and nonclinical habilitative care services for people of all ages and health and skill levels, across home and community settings. BrightSpring is one of the largest providers of diversified home and community-based health services to complex, high-cost populations. Its primary businesses include: behavioral health (including autism services), home health care (including personal care, home health, and hospice), neurotherapy, and job placement and vocational training, supported by pharmacy and telecare ancillary technologies and services. These businesses employ more than 45,000 dedicated team members in more than 40 states and provide services to more than 2 million people annually.
As chief revenue and innovation officer at BrightSpring, my focus is on business improvement to support revenue and increase cash collections.
Patient Payment Challenges
Before partnering with InstaMed, all billing and payment processes were paper-based. As a provider of home care services, we don’t have patients who come into our office and interact with our billing staff. There’s never really an ideal time to discuss patient financials, especially when you are in a patient’s home. Our approach at the time was to administer care – which is always our focus – and then send a bill to the patient’s home address. This manual, paper-based billing process was inefficient and costly to our business. Our staff spent significant time mailing out paper bills, processing paper checks and posting and reconciling payments.
Over the years, we started to see more clients who wanted to pay with credit cards, so we worked to find a solution that could help us give our clients a more efficient way to pay their invoices.
Overall, we were looking for a more streamlined payment experience for our clients to give them more options and improve the clarity of the billing process.
Improving Our Billing and Payments Process
We partnered with InstaMed to analyze our billing and payments process. First, we identified goals for our patient statements; we wanted to improve the overall look and feel of our billing statements, clearly define how clients could pay and optimize our messaging on the statement. We also wanted to streamline the paper process. After working with InstaMed to determine the best approach to achieve our goals, we removed the payment coupon, or tear stub, from our statements to drive more clients to the online bill payment option. The new enhanced patient statements clearly helped patients to better understand their bills and the payment options. Because they recognized our brand, they trusted the online billing site. As a result, our billing staff is more efficient because they spend less time processing and reconciling manual payments.
The payment option from our website drives patients to InstaMed’s portal for instant bill payment. Patients also have 24/7 access to features like eStatement enrollment, automatic payments, payment plans and a digital wallet.
To make sure that clients were aware of their new payment options, we worked with InstaMed to create messaging for our website and our statements and added marketing inserts into our admission packets, etc. to ensure our clients were aware of the new online payment options
The Cherry on Top
InstaMed is a PCI Level One Service Provider and the leader in health care payment security, so we can trust that our patient payment data is secure and protected.
Initial Results
This process is new, but we have heard from clients that paying their bills online is a much-improved option and we’ve seen operational efficiencies already! We’re happy to continue our InstaMed partnership as we work to improve eStatement adoption and paper reduction. Ultimately our goal is to make sure our caregivers can continue to focus on care and InstaMed has allowed us to do just that.
Watch the webinar to learn more about BrightSpring and its initial results with InstaMed.