While the primary goal of any healthcare facility is delivering quality and reliable care, several financial issues can impact the ability to provide patient resources or invest in advanced solutions. The healthcare and dental industries constantly face multiple challenges on various fronts. These facilities must navigate payment processes, insurance claims, security risks, and financial management to keep the practice running smoothly.
These challenges can impact operational efficiencies and lead to decreases in profit or unsteady cash flows. These outcomes can also diminish patient outcomes by affecting a facility’s ability to maintain vital resources. Understanding these challenges is the first step to finding solutions. Below, you can find the six most common challenges in the industry and where you can find tools to overcome them.
Challenges to Address in Your Healthcare Facility
Financial management is a daunting task with many moving parts. Between administrative errors and patients neglecting their responsibilities, many factors can impact whether a practice maintains a steady and consistent cash flow. Common issues with card payments and payment management for dentists and physicians include:
1. Late payments and delays
Late payments and payment delays are some of the most significant challenges in the healthcare industry. Waiting for reimbursements or navigating insurance claims can lead to financial strain for some practices. Collecting copays can also be a burden for some offices because rejected claims due to incorrect information can cause payment delays.
Generally, offices should collect copays before delivering a service to avoid payment delays later. Practices can also implement upfront payments for all copays and fees to prevent financial strain. This strategy can be especially beneficial for expensive treatments to avoid patient strain after treatment.
2. Human entry errors
As with any manual process, human errors can significantly impact financial stability. Minor errors or incorrect information in insurance claims can result in denials, leading to increased stress for patients and staff and timely processes to resolve the issue. Sending duplicate bills or additional bills as a result of incorrect filing or processing can also cause confusion for patients and make the payment process more challenging to complete. Furthermore, inaccurate estimates or totals can lead to unhappy patients who decide to change providers, possibly impacting the facility’s reputation and decreasing revenue.
Automating the payment process can reduce the amount of errors an office faces and improve the patient experience. By reducing human errors, your team can work more efficiently, and patients can enjoy more transparency with their estimates and dues. Your team can enjoy a reprieve from repetitive, manual tasks and dedicate more time to improving the patient experience.
3. Payment processing security risks
Protecting patient information is crucial. Dentists and physicians constantly handle sensitive information regarding patient health, addresses, phone numbers, and more. Payment security risks can add stress to the payment process by making information potential targets for breaches.
The proper safeguards can prevent or minimize damage from data breaches and create more trust between an organization and its patients. Utilizing secure management processes can highlight a business as trustworthy and prevent unwanted legal action as a result of mishandled information.
4. Payment collection processes
Although collecting payments is essential to an efficient facility, it can be time-consuming. Tracking patients, sending invoices, and attempting follow-ups are often mundane tasks that staff members complete repeatedly. These tasks divert administrative staff from more complex issues without guaranteeing a positive outcome. Follow-ups can be especially time-consuming if your team must reach out to patients multiple times.
Implementing a monitoring and control strategy can prevent payment delays and help practices develop more efficient follow-up strategies. For example, an office might use an automated alert feature to send reminders for owed amounts, reducing tasks for staff while ensuring each patient receives essential information in a timely manner.
5. Maintaining cash flow
Struggling to maintain cash flow is often a result of some or all of the other payment-related issues. Payment delays, human error, security risks, and time-consuming processes can quickly impact cash flow. Offices have operational costs on top of these existing issues, presenting a significant financial strain for some practices. Facilities must continue delivering care despite cash flow struggles, but this problem can prevent the facility from improving patient outcomes. For example, an office with financial strain may miss opportunities to invest in advanced technology or more efficient tools that could benefit patients.
6. Following updates and claim guidelines
Each dentist and physician must understand the legal role of healthcare payments and the associated billing codes, updates, and guidelines. Although some of these factors may be outside of a facility’s control, there are ways to better manage the process of obtaining information to maintain adherence to payment policies. Investing in automation and advanced technology can ease these concerns and provide the necessary support for a practice to access up-to-date information. These solutions can also rectify flaws in the payment process, making for an improved patient experience that benefits the practice.
How Rectangle Health can Help Dentists and Physicians
Caring for patients by retaining your current base and opening your doors to new patients is essential for a healthy practice. Meeting your patients’ needs and finding optimized processes is a crucial aspect of keeping patients happy and ensuring facility stability. Rectangle Health has the solutions you need to manage the payment process and reimagine how you engage with patients.
At Rectangle Health, we make healthcare payments simple with safe and secure payment solutions so practices can thrive. We utilize an easy-to-use solution to automate and optimize payment capture. Our solutions ease administrative burdens while enhancing your overall efficiency and productivity. We can support payment plans to boost patient outcomes and offer a range of payment solutions to highlight your practice as caring and adaptable. You can benefit from:
- Automatic payment posting.
- Seamless technology integrations.
- Reduced staff burdens.
- Cutting costs associated with paper payments.
- Enhancing the patient experience.
- Improving cash flow.
- Address your patients’ financial needs.
- Convenient online 24/7 bill pay.
Our solutions empower practices to eliminate data entry errors, offer convenient payment methods, and reduce paper states with text-to-pay features. Our goal is to maximize efficiency for your office so that you can feel confident in our solutions.
Overcome Challenges with Rectangle Health
Rectangle Health supports practices like yours and has years of experience finding solutions for many facilities. As a leader in innovative technology for healthcare, we understand the importance of automated and optimized processes. Our more than three decades of innovation empower us to provide unrivaled solutions for dentists and physicians, empowering them to boost the patient experience. You can see our solutions in action by requesting a demo to determine how we can benefit your organization.
