The Challenge: Lowered collections due to shifting patient healthcare costs
Premier Health is an acute care health system serving Southwest Ohio and generates over $2 billion annually from 1,951 beds in five acute care hospitals. As exemplified by their multiple Press Gainey Beacon of Excellence awards, Premier Health delivers clinical excellence with a focus on patient satisfaction.
As the cost of healthcare continues to shift from employers and insurance companies to patients themselves, Premier Health’s financial recovery rates from individual patients were dropping. Growing patient balances were creating financial pressures for the hospital and affecting revenue cycle management.
The solution: AI-Powered collections strategy to maximize revenue outcomes
Firstsource implemented its Receivables Management solution that fast tracks payments through an AI-powered machine learning model and omnichannel engagement maintaining the focus on patients.
Firstsource’s multi-channel platform with wide integration capabilities across systems connected with Premier Health’s Epic system to access patient history. Our proprietary scoring and segmentation model then provided a ‘propensity to pay’ score to each account. Optimized customer touchpoints were then recommended through a Unified Omnichannel Desktop and Next Best Actions to suggest appropriate payment plans to patients.
In an effort to tightly coordinate and digitize the balance collection process, the IT departments from Firstsource and Premier collaborated to build a highly efficient infrastructure. Employees from both organizations used a dedicated VPN tunnel and TLS-encrypted access in order to assign accounts to work queues using custom Epic billing indicators.
Premier Health initiated The Premier Patient Experience Program, which trained employees on patient satisfaction practices using the “Acknowledge, Introduce, Determine, Explain and Thank” (AIDET) methodology. As an example of true partnership and dedication to the Premier patient experience, all Firstsource team members are required to complete this training. Firstsource has also adopted the AIDET model as required training for all patient account representatives.
The result: Reducing bad debts while ensuring patient satisfaction
Firstsource accelerated the account resolution process, reduced bad debt and the number of patients reaching bad debt, while maintaining high levels of patient satisfaction Premier patients had come to expect.
AI-powered accounts receivable collections process delivered $600K incremental cash in four months and $2.6M in collections over 16 months.
