Wells Fargo & Co. this month is rolling out an online health care payment product that integrates various functions to help hospitals improve patient payment collection systems and to expand its relationships with commercial customers.
Wells last year began pilot testing its Patient Payment Solution with five large health care providers that were seeking new approaches to collecting payments directly from patients, who increasingly are shouldering more up-front health care costs.
The Web-based system, developed with technology from InstaMed Communications LLC of Philadelphia, is the latest in a growing array of payment collection tools designed to help clinics and hospitals quickly verify patients' insurance eligibility, generate an estimate of their total out-of-pocket costs and provide options for patients to pay for charges due immediately and to set up payment plans for future services.
Similar to other such offerings, Wells' Patient Payment Solution service enables health care providers to collect payment from patients when they check in through credit and debit cards, checks, cash and the automated clearing house system. Certain payments requiring insurance adjudication are paid later, Wells said. The patient payment service stores payment card data securely in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Wells said.
"The health care payments landscape is changing as more patients become more involved in consumer-directed health care plans that often include more co-pays and deductibles," said Justin Freeman, Wells' senior vice president and product manager for lockbox and health care services. "Previously, a lot of these consumer payments were turning into bad debt, so hospitals are looking for more creative ways to collect these payments up front."
Card-based options proved most popular during the pilot test among providers collecting patient payments "because of the simplicity of the process," Freeman said. Providers showed no particular preference for credit cards over debit cards, he said.
Wells' merchant services business acquires the card-based transactions it handles through its Patient Payment Solution technology, and it supports all payment types the service accepts, Freeman said.
"Wells provides the payment gateway to our customers for any type of payment they want to accept," he said.
A dedicated Wells sales force is promoting the new service, Freeman said, declining to specify costs to providers. "Costs vary based on the scope of what providers want, but in most cases we can show a clear return on investment, especially for providers that were only collecting 40% to 50% of these payments before implementing our system," he said.
Besides collecting more accounts receivable, providers also save thousands per year on billing and paperwork, Freeman said. "Essentially, our service is a huge efficiency play for these hospitals," he said.
Wells developed its health care payments service primarily for large clinics and hospitals, but providers may adapt it to any size of health care operation, Freeman said.
One advantage Wells hopes to capitalize on in selling the new service is its strong market share in remote check deposit services, which are popular among health care providers who accept "a high number" of checks as payments for patients' services.
"We have a large customer base among doctors' offices and clinics that already use our desktop-based check deposit systems, and because those services can easily be packaged and integrated together with our Patient Payment Solution, we think that will be very attractive to health care providers," Freeman said.
Wells also hopes to cross-sell its new patient payment service to existing commercial banking customers involved in health care, which includes many large clinics and hospitals.
Keith Theisen, executive vice president and director of product management for Wells' treasury management group, said the bank's Healthcare Financial Services unit is one of the nation's largest providers of commercial and investment banking, credit, treasury management and capital and equipment financing to nonprofit health care operations.
"We see health care as a large and growing area in the future, and we're doing a lot of strategic work to bring the bank's resources together to provide seamless, integrated services to a larger number of customers," Theisen said. He said he is not daunted by the recent expansion of a variety of similar competing card-based health care patient payment systems. "We anticipate seeing a lot of competition in this area, and we intend to be one of the major players in it," Theisen said.
