Patients’ inability to pay continues to be a struggle for health care providers.
1/7/2019 9:00
Online payments are catching up in the health care industry, where common payment methods continue to be on-site, mail and through live phone agents.
BillingTree, in results from its third annual Healthcare Operations and Technology Survey, reports 63 percent of providers offer web portal payments and more than 25 percent also offer options for text-based payment—a substantial increase over previous years’ findings.
Of note, providers’ responses show that plans to implement text-based payments surpass “Interactive Voice Response (IVR) automation.”
“The survey found the biggest payment pain-points facing health care providers for two consecutive years have been a patient’s inability to pay, collecting once the patient has left the facility, a lack of payment channels, compliance and issues related to insurance billing,” according to a news release from BillingTree, an ACA International affiliate member company in Phoenix.
However, the survey results also show payment options are changing to address these pain-points as well as patients who prefer having customer service and payment availability 24/7, according to the news release.
“The BillingTree Healthcare Survey series continues to show a sector gravitating toward new payment technologies to improve revenue cycle management. This is evident in the continued strong adoption of web portals, IVR and now, for the first time, text-related payments—mirroring the overall mobile payment trend in the industry,” Pat McIntyre, BillingTree’s vice president of healthcare, said in the news release.