Patient Payments Blog

When I published the opener to this subject of change I had no idea about Laura, hurricane Laura that is. She was a category four hurricane making  landfall on August 27th. Just fourteen days after my first post about change. 

As I watched the newscasts I thought about all the change that would come to people’s lives. I wondered if they were prepared. 

I’m writing this follow-up from my office that is about forty miles to the east of one major Oregon fire and forty miles west of what may become the largest fire ever recorded in Oregon. Two fires on either side of me. The skies over me are an eerie amber. A dystopian shade of grey-red. Ash covers my car outside, I’m listening to the news and watching the evacuation orders. Change may soon come to my door. 

David Bowie reached out from the past to capture the mood of 2020 in the first line of his song Changes:

Let's be real - there are over twenty million people out of work right now. They are struggling to pay their rents, mortgages, utilities, and often, basic necessities. Their medical bills are so far down on the list of priorities they can't even imagine when they will be able to pay them. 

Telemedicine has been on the radar for awhile now. Its benefits and downsides have been hotly debated. Coding has been an issue. Efficacy and loss of personal touch has been a great concern. But, all of these aside, its time may now have come. 

If you are like me, your priority list gets mangled as soon as you walk in your office door each day. What you want and need to accomplish often gets pushed aside by the ever expanding needs of everyone else in your office. Some very important improvements seem to get permanently banished several lines deep in your 'to do' list, never to see the light of day.

Have you ever noticed how much personal, painful change a superhero must undergo in order to protect someone else’s everyday normality?  They change so everything can stay the same for others. That’s what makes them heroes. Normal folks typically resist change. Heroes embrace it.

There is nothing that screams 1983 louder than that credit card machine on your front counter. It’s a relic of a bygone era. A paperweight taking up room on your counter and making your office seem like Disco is still all the rage.

I wrote about this in my last post but it bears repeating. Many of us (myself included) need a few reminders before we move forward. My recent experience with trying to pay a bill made me even more passionate about making payment simple for your patients. 

The reasons your practice needs to begin taking online payments keep growing. More and more of your patients are accessing bill pay options online. Waiting to make online payments available to them will be seen as a failure to meet their expectations.

There may be some folks that love to collect past due balances; I just haven’t met any of them. So I’m gong to assume that most of us would rather prevent past due balances and forget having to collect them altogether.