The PFX Voice

A few years ago after my father died, I pored over the  bills we received from the hospital. Even with a background in healthcare revenue cycle, I couldn't make sense of some of them. I remember thinking, "If I can't understand these bills with all my years of experience in healthcare, how could the average person make sense of statements like these?"

Since then, I've been passionate about driving change in healthcare - in particular, around the patient financial experience. Recently, I shared insight on ways providers can design a better patient financial experience in a podcast with Gary David, PhD, Professor of Sociology, Professor of Information Design and Corporate Communication and the Founder of ethno-analytics, LLC, which focuses on integrated design and experience alignment. 

I’ve heard the same complaint recently from several hospital administrators. The scenarios are all pretty similar: They implemented a payment portal with very high hopes, sometimes stemming from promises made by vendors. But they got disappointing results.

If a patient complained so vehemently about an unpleasant collection encounter that it reached the CEO’s office, is that an indication that the hospital’s Patient Financial Experience is terrible? What if the same CEO, on the same day, gets a letter from a different patient raving about the registrar who brightened her day while collecting a $25 copay? Should you take it as a sign that the financial experience you offer is extremely high quality?

Somewhere along the way, a perception took hold in health care--that talking with patients about money was a direct path to dissatisfaction. In this blog, I’m going to turn this assumption on its head. Is it possible that hospitals are getting it backwards—that in fact, patients are dissatisfied because they want to talk about money and no one is having this conversation with them? If so, it certainly calls into question many of the processes we use in the revenue cycle today. But it might also offer hospitals a path to achieving earlier resolution of accounts--by tapping into what patients really want.

I recently read with great interest that Avery Comarow, director of U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals and other healthcare rankings, recently retired after 31 years with the organization. [1]