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If you’ve checked out our newly rebranded website, you might have seen the bio of our founder and CEO Rajesh Voddiraju. To quote his site bio, “Rajesh is smart. Really smart. So smart that we now have a jar where we drop $1 every time we learn something new from Rajesh. The jar has to be emptied once a week.” There is no doubt that we here at Health iPASS recognize Rajesh as an amazing source of information and insight about the financial side of the healthcare industry. That’s why we recently asked him to share some of the top ways revenue cycle management will be changing in the coming months. This week, we are focusing on the first of these predictions.
According to Rajesh, the healthcare revolution has already started—and it’s being led by robots. Well, sort of. We’re actually talking here about the increased role of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the healthcare industry. To the uninitiated, this concept may be daunting, but it really amounts to many back-office tasks that have traditionally been handled manually now becoming automated, allowing front-office teams to focus on one of their mist important core competencies - allocating time to providing patients a more, not less, human touch.
Your Digital Assistant
For example, Health iPASS enables medical providers to verify insurance eligibility and benefits pre-appointment, capture a card-on-file for future payment assurance, provide client-branded appointment reminders, deliver cost estimates before, at, and after office visits, and enable convenient, multi-channel payment options. Far from replacing office staff with a machine, Health iPASS works more like a digital assistant, freeing your front desk team to directly interact with patients more than ever before.
Data Mining for Price Transparency
One of the ways that AI and machine learning are directly affecting the patient revenue cycle is by providing patients with ways to better understand their benefits and out-of-pocket costs. This is accomplished through data mining, or drawing from claims and rate-of-reimbursement data from different payers and providers. Washington State is even providing healthcare cost information next to quality-of-care data so that patients can make truly informed healthcare decisions. Isn’t data mining cool? I kind of like to picture tiny robots in a digitized landscape with little pickaxes, gathering valuable chunks of information and sending them up in buckets to be combined into an understandable format for healthcare consumers.
But seriously folks, AI and machine learning have the power to change healthcare as we know it. The Health iPASS patient revenue cycle platform uses these technologies to help providers meet the rising demand for healthcare transparency. Our proprietary machine learning-based engine literally learns how to provide better cost estimates with every claim. You may have heard that multiple states are passing healthcare price transparency legislation. I’m totally kidding. Of course you have heard about it. We’re not trying to beat that proverbial dead horse, but it’s absolutely true and should compel practices to proactively do something to advance price transparency instead of scrambling at the last minute to comply with government mandates.
The Time to Automate is Now
Before too long, if not already, the old-school method of manually checking in patients and sending out paper bills will become obsolete. Not only do these manual efforts slow down workflows and inflate the cost and time to collect outstanding balances from patients, they also do not provide the sleek, tech-infused and modern patient experience people want. Upgrading your patient revenue cycle technology contributes positively to the patient satisfaction metrics that can make or break your practice in the age of healthcare consumerism.
Bottom line, AI and machine learning in patient revenue cycle management, and in the healthcare industry as a whole, is the future. We here at Health iPASS think that future looks pretty bright. All I can say is, “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!”
