Billing tech boosts patient-initiated payments at BrightSpring

BrightSpring Health Services is one of the largest diversified home and community-based health services providers in the country, serving 2 million people every year.

THE PROBLEM

As a provider of home care services, it does not have clients who come into its offices and interact with its billing staff, so there is never really an ideal time to discuss financials.

“This became a bigger challenge in recent years as consumer payment responsibility continued to evolve,” said Laurie Babin, chief revenue and innovation officer at BrightSpring Health Services. “We needed to streamline the payment experience for our clients, but relying on paper-based processes slowed us down, leading to lengthy time to payment and high costs to collect.”

PROPOSAL

BrightSpring Health Services selected vendor InstaMed to help analyze its billing and payment process and offer clients convenient options to pay and manage their bills. The patient billing system has enabled BrightSpring to leverage the vendor’s consumer-tested statement layout, which is designed to eliminate paper from the billing and payments process by driving online payments and e-statement adoption.

“The InstaMed Patient Portal allowed us to offer our clients a simple yet robust online payment experience, where they could pay bills with their preferred payment method, manage a digital wallet, view payment history, enroll for e-statements, and set up automatic payments,” Babin explained. “In addition to delivering a better experience for our clients, the solutions would simplify workflow and improve operational efficiencies.”

BrightSpring hoped to see a significant decline in paper, reduced time and costs to collect, and increased client satisfaction with the billing and payments experience.

MARKETPLACE

There are many healthcare finance and payments systems vendors with a wide variety of offerings on the market. These vendors include BillingTree, Bottomline Technologies, Lightbeam Health Solutions, Paya, Rectangle Health, SA Ignite, Strata Decision Technology, Triple Tree and Waypoint.

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

BrightSpring implemented the vendor’s patient statement layout, which drives online adoption by eliminating the payment coupon and return envelope altogether.

“We had more clients wanting to pay with credit cards, so we did not expect to hear many objections,” Babin said. “As our clients use fewer paper checks, we are making it much easier to pay online where they could use their preferred payment method – including electronic check.”

“Our clients are choosing other electronic options like e-statements, which cuts down our postage and printing costs for billing.”

Laurie Babin, BrightSpring Health Services

BrightSpring also is offering an online payment experience through its branded InstaMed Patient Portal. However, to ensure client adoption and a smooth transition to a new process, BrightSpring worked with the vendor to develop marketing materials to help communicate the change to its clients.

Click on page 2 below to read how the organization increased patient-initiated payments, which led to a variety of benefits.

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