Key Consumer Touchpoints: Patient Bills and Patient Reviews

by Clive Riddle, August 23, 2019

Patient bills and patient reviews and two consumer touchpoints with significant business impact for providers. Two papers have just been released with survey results on these topics.

OODA Health in partnership with HIMSS has just released a 7-page report: Why Patient Payments are a System Issue, that examines “how consumer healthcare payment dysfunction affects all healthcare stakeholders, creating unforeseen system-wide issues and interfering with patient care. The study surveyed executives from U.S. hospitals and health systems, health insurers, payers and health plan administrators.”

Their survey found: 

• Two-thirds of clinicians indicated that dealing with patient collections takes time away from patient care
• Providers say 44% of patients are frequently distracted by bills and payment concerns, resulting in a lower level of compliance and adherence to medical plans
• 67% of providers use patient collections to justify rate increases during payer negotiations
• 85% of payers report that member satisfaction drives benefit design, at least to a moderate extent
• 63% of payers report they want greater insight into how plan complexity is experienced by the member
• 4% of payers indicated that having actual consumer payment data would improve their models

Meanwhile PatientPop has just released a 17-page white paper, their second annual study: Healthcare Providers Survey Report: Online Reputation Management,  in which they surveyed 233 healthcare providers nationwide about their online reputation management experiences to learn more and identify trends. PatientPop found that: 

• 47.6% of healthcare providers say they’re not sure how to positively affect their reputation. 
• 76.1% of healthcare providers worry about receiving negative reviews from patients; 41% are very or extremely concerned. 
• 89.9% of healthcare providers have seen reviews of their practices online. 
• More than half of healthcare providers say they have seen reviews of their practice on Google and Yelp. 
• 64.5% of healthcare providers have visiting patients who say they’ve read a review of their practice. 
• 52.2% of practices spend 10+ hours a week on administrative tasks related to patient communication. Of those, 34.7% spend 30+ hours a week.