Editor’s note: Welcome to Practice Points, by physician practice management experts Capko & Morgan. It is their belief – and ours too – that the more education sales reps receive on the issues facing their customers, the better prepared they are to provide solutions. Their emphasis is on helping physicians build patientcentered strategies and valuing staff’s contributions.
Encouraging your customers to test innovative technology solutions for their business
By Laurie Morgan, Capko & Morgan
The recent wave of new healthcare technology products has been very fascinating and encouraging. Our industry faces so many challenges, especially on the practice management side. Many of these problems are most painful for private practices, the segment of our industry that I work with most often. Technology offers many promising new ways to address them.
For example, one focal point of innovation in the past couple of years has been in payment technology that better estimates patients’ out-of-pocket costs for services. With high deductible plans becoming more common (and the deductibles getting higher), it has become essential for practices to estimate these amounts at the time services are rendered. When practices can’t help patients understand their costs, the risk of non-payment rises dramatically. Patient relationships suffer, too, when deductibles lead to large bills that come as unpleasant surprises.
Recent technology approaches to the estimation-and-payment problem have been diverse and ingenious. They include software that works within or with practice management systems to speed up health plan verification and eligibility checks alongside out-of-pocket cost estimation; tablets and kiosks that allow patients to understand their financial obligations and set up their own payment arrangements discreetly – right inside the practice reception area; apps that allow patients to look up their out-of-pocket costs and pay them using their own smartphones; and websites that allow patients to select and pay their providers before booking a service.
Multiple solutions
What I love most about these new approaches is how driven they are by market needs. The developers have identified a problem that hurts both practices and patients, and they’ve come up with multiple solutions. In many cases, practices can use more than one solution at a time – allowing them to offer patients more options to understand and meet their financial obligations, and meet them in ways that they find most convenient and comfortable.
These products are in some ways a response to the changes created by healthcare reform. But they’re not themselves part of any government mandate. They won’t succeed unless they do a good job meeting practice and patient needs. And they must be affordable. These are all excellent reasons for practices to check them out – yet managers and physicians sometimes hesitate. Technology has not always been perceived to be reliable or profitable by physician practices. Memories of past implementation challenges and unmet expectations are not soon forgotten.
What’s the best way to encourage trial, when practice managers don’t perceive urgency – and when they do perceive a lot of risk? Create more of the former, and minimize the latter. The good news is, many technology vendors already incorporate these ideas into their business models. When a practice can try a new technology – and pay only a reasonable percentage of the revenue it captures – this lowers the bar for experimenting. Large conversion and integration fees, conversely, may lead to hesitation – but even they can be overcome when practices have the opportunity to speak with doctors actually using technology tools. Or better yet, see the tools in action at a colleague’s practice.
I’m a passionate advocate of tech tools that can help practices solve the problems presented by high deductible health plans while protecting patient relationships. But I’m only one voice. When vendors make it easy for practices to try their tools – and easy to walk away if they’re not a fit – they dramatically increase the likelihood that practice managers and physicians will give technology another try. And that’s a win-win for patients and the practices they rely on.