As frustrating as the pandemic is for patients, frontline healthcare workers are exhausted, stretched thin and quitting in battalions. This is having impacts across practices, including back-office functions that are falling behind on receivables.
Removing the friction from healthcare payments with specialized forms of credit can alleviate some of the pain providers are feeling, while improving patient experience.
Observing that “the patient really has become the new payer,” CareCredit CEO Alberto Casellas told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, “The shift to consumerism and the consumer becoming a larger payer of [medical bills] has definitely changed the way practices, providers and hospital systems are able to manage how they’re going to get paid for the services that they rendered.”
With more financial responsibility on the shoulders of patients who are often unprepared to handle these expenses, understaffed practices find themselves corralling third-party payers, “but they also have to go to thousands of individual consumers that have outstanding [balances],” Casellas said, greatly compounding the provider cash crunch.
Dealing with consumers as payers “obviously requires a different setup,” he said.
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