Patient Payments Blog

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.

Topics: Patient Payment Solutions, communication, patient communication

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.

Topics: practice management, growth, improvement

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.

Topics: Patient Payment Solutions, Patient Experience

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. 

Topics: Patient Payment Technology, Payments, Patient Experience

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.

Topics: Financial Policy, Patient Experience, Retail Healthcare

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.

Topics: Patient Balances, Patient Collections, Past Due Balances

Without being rude, a patient needs to be reminded that he or she will most likely owe your practice money. This needs to be clearly stated at the beginning of your relationship. With existing patients, at the beginning point of his or her next treatment.

 

Not only is this reminder the most important part of your financial policy; it is the most difficult to communicate in a non-confrontational way.

Topics: Patient Payments, Patient Payment Policies, Financial Policy

If you could gain an extra hour in your week or day in your month; what would it be worth to you? I’ve often heard the old saying, ‘Once time has been lost, it cannot be regained’. That’s tragic.

Topics: Medical Office Administration, practice management, Personal Time, Stress

My title sounds far fetched, doesn’t it? It’s over-the-top and a bit ‘National Enquirer’.  A little ridiculous to think that a payment plan could save someone’s life. But it actually relates to a true story.

Topics: Patient Satisfaction, Payment Plans, Patient Experience

Have you seen the recent stories about Chick-Fil-A? Not the ones that bash them for their stands on hot button issues. But the ones that report they are America’s favorite fast food restaurant? And the ones that talk about how they train their employees? 

Topics: patient retention, Patient Centered Care, Ideas, improvement