Trends in Healthcare Payments: How To Put Your Practice Ahead

Compared to other healthcare practices, how would you rate your organization’s success with collecting payments? Do patients often fail to pay their bills on time? 

Many factors could be impacting your ability to collect full, on-time payments, but having outdated payment processing solutions could certainly be one of them. 

Being aware of current trends in healthcare payments can help you understand what your practice needs to improve to stay competitive with other healthcare organizations and maximize profits. Learn the biggest healthcare payment trends today and how your practice can use them to improve the patient experience. 

Flexible Payment Options

According to Weave’s 2023 healthcare business insights report, a significant percentage of healthcare providers (67%) are already seeing patients delay care due to economic concerns and the potential of a recession. Patients may not have the funds to pay their medical bills upfront, or they may worry that they will need the money for a more pressing expense. 

Other times, patients neglect to make payments because the payment methods your practice offers aren’t convenient for them. Implementing flexible payment methods can give patients the opportunity to pay their medical bills through whatever method they find easiest or most convenient, allowing your healthcare organization to collect payments faster and save staff time spent following up with patients about past-due bills.

Examples of flexible payment methods include:

• Contactless payments (i.e., Apple Pay, contactless credit cards, or smart cards)
• An online payment portal where patients can make payments from a mobile or desktop device
• Payment Plans so patients can receive necessary care right away instead of waiting for funds
• Text-to-pay allows you to send and receive bill payments over text

Offering flexible payment solutions can assist payers to more easily pay and understand your payment structure so you can get paid faster.

But for those who do not have the money to pay a healthcare bill in full, here’s a deep dive into some methods you might not have tried before, which can help collect more and collect faster.

Offering Payment Plans

For patients who can’t pay their healthcare bills upfront, offering a payment plan can provide flexibility that may lead patients to choose your practice over other healthcare provider organizations. Weave’s insights report for the healthcare industry found that 31% of providers are already seeing an increase in patients using a payment plan.

You can structure your payment plans in a few different ways to suit your practice’s needs. For instance, you may invite healthcare consumers to use third-party financing services, such as CareCredit or Sunbit.

These services typically pay you upfront for the patient’s service, then handle patient collections independently moving forward, often charging interest after a designated period. With these financing options, your practice won’t need to spend time tracking down missed payments or neglected bills; you can pass the payment responsibility to a third party. 

Alternatively, your healthcare practice can consider integrating a payment plan into your patient portal or by staff in the office. Patients can divide their bills into monthly installments and make digital payments on your portal. You can charge interest on these payments or implement a fee for late or missed installments. 

Text-to-Pay

Did you know that the average person spends over three hours on their smartphone each day? Offering text-to-pay options is another effective way to remove patient barriers to making payments and increase the bottom line for your healthcare practice. 

Weave found that 45% of patients would be more likely to quickly pay a health care invoice if they received a text invoice with a link to pay. Many consumers may already be on their phones when they receive the text, and if not, they’ll probably check their text messages and see the bill within the next few hours. 

Instead of seeing their medical bill and saying, “I’ll make that payment later,” payers can click the link in their text messages and pay their bills online immediately. They can use credit cards or debit cards that they already have saved in their digital wallets for added convenience.

Text-to-pay is a big healthcare payment trend today. By offering this secure payment method, you can separate your healthcare practice as a modern organization that values patient satisfaction and uses innovative tools. 

Insurance Providers

If you’re like many healthcare providers, you don’t only rely on direct patient payments to fund your healthcare practice. You also need insurance companies to reimburse you for health care services. 

Navigating insurance claims is one of the more time-consuming aspects of medical billing. Weave’s insights report found that 38% of healthcare organizations find insurance claims to be the biggest hassle for their staff. 

Your employees likely spend a significant amount of time on insurance verification daily. Contacting the insurance company, reviewing each provider’s covered services, and verifying that your services fit the bill is time-consuming. 

For patients who have a Medicare Advantage plan, your practice will also need to spend time verifying their Medicare coverage. Unless you’re an Accountable Care Organization, you probably offer Medicaid services alongside services to traditionally insured patients, requiring two separate processes for insurance verification. 

Using a more efficient verification solution can save your staff time and improve your rate of payment fulfillment. For instance, Weave Insurance Verification is a tool for dental offices that can automatically verify a patient’s insurance coverage and save you a significant amount of time. While it doesn’t cover every potential situation, our customers have seen the time they spend doing insurance verification shrink by half.

With Weave Insurance Verification, you can:

• Easily filter data to find specific insurance coverage information
• Communicate with payers directly through the Weave app to ask questions about their insurance coverage or request documentation
• Automatically integrate insurance verification information into your patient schedule
• Save time and devote more of your attention to improving patient outcomes and fostering a positive consumer experience

Even if you don’t implement an insurance verification solution, you and your staff can brainstorm ways to streamline this process. For example, maybe conduct biannual training for new staff members to learn best practices. 

Weave’s Payment Solution for Healthcare

These healthcare payment solutions may sound great, but you’re probably wondering: how do you integrate digital healthcare payments into your practice? Won’t that take up a lot of time? 

Instead of looking for multiple payment solutions, consider an all-in-one healthcare payment system that can broaden your practice’s payment flexibility. Weave Payments allows for hassle-free healthcare payments and flexible payment options through a wide range of features and tools. You can handle every aspect of payment processing in a singular healthcare payment system. 

With Weave Payments, your practice can: 

• Enable consumers to pay their bills through a link delivered by text message
• Allow patients to pay their bills on your website or through a customized link 
• Offer patient financing options through Sunbit
• Accept all popular payment methods in-office or over the phone
• Streamline your billing workflow 

Because Weave comes with flat-rate, predictable pricing, you can easily incorporate this system into your overall healthcare costs. You won’t need to worry about paying surprise fees when patients use specific payment methods.

Weave’s patient automation platform enables your healthcare providers to incorporate your payment methods into your greater patient engagement solutions. You can communicate with patients directly through the Weave platform, manage your patient schedule, create digital forms, and complete a wide range of other tasks with Weave.

Using Weave can help your practice stay competitive with other healthcare providers in your area and always remain on top of emerging payment trends. In fact, 83% of offices using Weave to modernize and streamline their payments reported collecting payments faster. Best of all, the platform is very user-friendly and won’t take much time to integrate into your practice. 

Are you ready to learn how Weave can benefit your healthcare organization and keep up with trends in healthcare payments? Request your free Weave demo today.