Background
Premier Health is an acute care health system serving Southwest Ohio.
Premier 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.
Business challenge
Recent trends indicate that the cost of healthcare continues to shift from employers and insurance companies to patients themselves. Because the financial recovery rate from individual patients is lower than from insurance carriers, growing patient balances are causing financial pressures for many hospitals.
Firstsource solution
Introduced proprietary scoring and segmentation system
In an effort to tightly coordinate and automate the balance collection process, the IT departments from Firstsource and Premier collaborated to build a highly efficient infrastructure. Employees from both organizations use a dedicated VPN tunnel and TLS encrypted access in order to assign accounts to work queues using custom Epic billing indicators. Premier Health’s Epic system interacts daily with Firstsource’s account processing system which utilizes a proprietary scoring and segmentation model; this system then assigns a ‘propensity to pay’ score to each account and indicates the appropriate work events accordingly.
Optimized customer touchpoints
Work events, such as statements, letters, attended calls, unattended calls, etc., are the best practices necessary to resolve each type of account and are derived from analyses of years of production and operation experience.
Trained our people to meet custom needs
In 2014, 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 and continue to participate in the quarterly booster training. Firstsource has also adopted the AIDET model as required training for all patient account representatives.
