Recasting the Patient Billing Experience with Design Thinking

Medical billing and payment is tricky, time consuming, and exhausting. There is often a co-pay on site, a payment for the procedures or hospital stay, an insurance portion, a patient portion, etc. It often takes months to process and collect payments, and the process costs providers money and makes many of us cringe with all the notices, bills, and paperwork.

The healthcare provider has, for the most part, hidden the payment process in the back office, and patients rarely know what costs they are incurring until they receive the bill. It’s like a trip down the yellow brick road in the classic Wizard of Oz, when at the end, a mysterious voice tells you what you need to know – what payment is due, in this case, right away.

In many cases, the organization has also outsourced the billing and collections to a service provider like Sutherland Healthcare Solutions. Recognizing that consumerism is making the relationship with the patient more critical to the healthcare provider, Sutherland has brought a design thinking based approach to recast the patient’s billing experience for a client. The intent is to increase patient satisfaction and loyalty, and engage patients more effectively in the payment process, and also drive down administrative cost.  In effect, to remove the façade of Oz.

Sutherland uses its customer experience research team, in Sutherland Labs, to help healthcare clients better understand and improve consumer experience. The approach is rooted in observation, based on the premise of anthropologist Margaret Mead, that “What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.”  Sutherland wants to add depth and context to what the clinicians or the patients “tell” them about their experience. So, they have a “Patient Experience” team that includes psychologists and anthropologists who will discretely participate in the non-clinical aspects of a patient’s experience and focus on “behavior.”  They analyze the collective findings from observations, interviews, and “walking the halls.” 

Instead of just focusing on the business process that they are managing, Sutherland steps outside the box to observe and analyze the complete billing cycle, for example, from the perspective of the patient and the provider and makes recommendations to make it more effective for both parties, without assuming they already know.

This approach also helps to create conversation and transparency, and insights to help simplify and speed it up.  Putting together and analyzing all the data, taking into consideration the interactions, the content, the physical space, behaviors, and the steps in the process, the team is able to make a series of suggestions to change the experience.

Learning directly that patients want more tools to prepare for their hospital services, Sutherland is working with its client to introduce new touch-points with patients, including health insurance enrollment outreach, a healthcare credit card payment option, and pre-access services for registration, appointment reminders, cost estimators, expedited check-in, patient portals and mobile applications.  This approach is leading to increased patient satisfaction and increased loyalty.  Over time, the healthcare provider expects to also see an increase in point-of-service payments, reducing long-term collections.

The use of design thinking here is putting the power in the hands of the patients. Instead of wanting to click their heels to just head back home when they need to visit a clinic, they could have a more personalized digital journey down the road to health. 

Note: Sutherland Healthcare Solutions is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sutherland Global Services.