Q&A with VisitPay – Simplify and Consolidate the Patient Experience

This is a guest post from Vincent Martino, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder of  VisitPay.

In this Q&A, Vincent Martino shares how VisitPay helps simplify and consolidate the patient experience. He also discusses the value of choosing a technology compatible with Sphere to ensure your organization continues to manage a single, integrated experience.

Why are health systems choosing a platform like VisitPay?

Vincent Martino: Health systems are choosing VisitPay primarily for the increase in patient satisfaction we drive combined with the resultant increase in cash payments.  The platform provides patients a consolidated billing process that creates an unparalleled amount of transparency, which in turn creates more loyal and better-paying patients.  Our clients Net Promoter Score (NPS) for their billing experience is in the 40’s, which is three times higher than the average across healthcare.  Bills are also higher than they have ever been, and providers have a need to deploy more advanced strategies and capabilities to manage this growing and difficult to collect asset.  The VisitPay team offers a tremendous amount of consumer finance experience to help guide and advise client-specific strategies, which can be enabled and delivered through the platform.

What teams in the health system are typically driving that work?

Martino: We team up with teams across the entire health system.  Of course, the CFO and rev cycle organization are key partners – VisitPay offers a lot of flexibility in terms of how it’s deployed, and many of the financial offer decisions will be driven by these teams.  Oftentimes the consumer experience team will also influence or drive some of the configurations.  The patient billing experience is complex and also is viewed as an increasingly important part of the overall healthcare experience.  Therefore we also partner with the information and technology groups, patient access, the treasury department, and the marketing departments.

What are the implications of this from a payment processing experience?

Martino: It’s important to create cohesive, system-centric experiences for your patients and operational efficiency for your staff.  Finding a patient financial experience company that can effectively partner and collaborate with the different teams within your healthcare system is very important – and it’s vital that your partner can drive alignment when you need them to do so.

Why is it good to have a single payment environment?

Martino: Having one integrated payment solution from end to end is a good thing for a health system and for your patients.  It provides the most efficiency for your staff in terms of posting, reconciliation, and reporting.  And it provides the best experience for patients by providing a single place to save payment method information.

Any industry trends in payments? Any that could influence change?

Martino: Prior to COVID, we were already seeing a trend around contactless payment and “login-less” payment, and the two essentially go together and can be one and the same. And COVID has only accelerated the need for contactless payments.  Every consumer today essentially has a “payment device” in the mobile phone they carry with them everywhere they go. VisitPay has deployed multiple novel ways to pay from that device, which are all contactless in nature.  One specific payment option we offer is “Text To Pay,” which serves as both a contactless and “password-less” way to pay.  VisitPay developed and now offers Text to Pay in partnership with Sphere.  This provides the patient with an automated text when a balance is due and provides them a way to pay their bill securely, without needing to log into an application to do so.   In general, we are seeing more consumers willing to pay from their mobile device using a variety of payment options – some of our clients have over 60% of their consumers paying via mobile devices.

How do these changing trends impact the people running infrastructure?

Martino: I think the organization should continually be looking to deploy new technologies that provide easier and better ways to pay bills.  That said, ideally, newly added technologies shouldn’t create an added process or management burden for the organization that manages the infrastructure.  There are vendors in the market that seamlessly combine technologies onto one platform to ensure efficiency for your team.  When assessing the market, be sure to ask if all payment technologies are centralized on a common processing, reporting, and reconciliation platform.

 

To learn more about VisitPay and Sphere solutions, such as Text to Pay, request a demo.