With COVID-19 unleashing a surge of phone calls from doctors' patients over billing and payments, Patientco has added its Interactive Voice Response solution as well as its self-service Patient Payments platform to the Epic App Orchard marketplace, where apps are made available to convert health care processes into digital experiences.
Baptist Memorial Health Care in Memphis, Tenn., has joined the list of organizations using the IVR integration for telephone calls, automating patient interactions and payments, and among the first to enable real-time payment posting into Epic systems and a single deposit that reconciles daily with the Baptist Memorial system.
“Since 2014, Patientco has focused on delivering proven payment integrations that ensure health systems utilize their existing technology to its full potential,” Sean Joyce, chief technology officer at Patientco, said in a Monday press release. “Our solutions in App Orchard make it easy for clients to offer their patients convenient, self-service payment options and empower medical staff to focus on the most complex patient support calls while automating the rest.”
For most health systems, Patientco says its IVR integration of patient interaction and self-serve payments results in a payment conversion rate of 78%. Payments are automatically tokenized, converting card payment numbers to a random sequence of characters, and processed through Patientco's infrastructure before direct posting into Epic. That process reduces the Payment Card Industry security standard scope for the health system.
“We wanted to give our patients the flexibility of payment by telephone in addition to our existing web and mobile options," Ron Wachsman, vice president and chief revenue cycle officer at Baptist Memorial Health Care, said in the release. "All of these options are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
