Spotting an opportunity to help hospitals improve patient-payment collection systems and to expand its relationships with commercial customers, Wells Fargo & Co. this month is rolling out an online health care payment product that integrates various functions.
Wells last year began piloting 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 upfront health care costs, such as more co-pays and higher deductibles.
The Web-based technology, developed with technology from Philadelphia-based InstaMed Communications LLC, is the latest in a growing array of payment-collection tools designed to help clinics and hospitals to 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 clearinghouse system. Certain payments requiring insurance adjudication are paid later, Wells says. The patient-payment service stores payment card data securely in compliance with Payment Card Industry data-security standards, Wells says.
“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,” Justin Freeman, Wells’ senior vice president and product manager, Lockbox and Healthcare Services, tells PaymentsSource. “Previously, a lot of these consumer payments were turning into bad debt, so hospitals are looking for more creative ways to collect these payments upfront.”
Card-based options proved most popular during the pilot among providers collecting patient payments “because of the simplicity of the process,” Freeman says. Providers showed no particular preference for credit cards over debit cards, he says.
Wells’ merchant-services unit acquires the card-based transactions it handles through its Patient Payment Solutions technology, and it supports all payment types the service accepts, Freeman says.
“Wells provides the payment gateway to our customers for any type of payment they want to accept,” he says.
A dedicated Wells sales force is promoting the new service, Freeman says, 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 says.
Besides collecting more accounts receivable, providers also save thousands per year on billing and paperwork, Freeman says. “Essentially, our service is a huge efficiency play for these hospitals,” he says.
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 says.
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 absorb “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 says.
Wells also hopes to cross-sell its new patient-payment service to existing commercial-banking customers involved in health care that include many large clinics and hospitals.
Keith Theisen, Wells executive vice president and director of product management, Treasury Management Group, says 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 says.
Theisen 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,” he says.
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