3. One of the biggest problems healthcare providers have today is justifying their pricing policies, which differentiate wildly depending on who's paying. I expect to be resolving bills from the delivery into early 2010 (e.g. I just finished resolving bills from a surgery from the same provider last March). The bill is candidly indecipherable, even to someone who knows the provider and the industry well. The problem is that the audience for the bills is not patients. The audience is insurance companies and government bureaucracies that have built massive claims processing systems. This is all well and good if providers could translate claim information into bills that patients (remember, they are the customers) could understand and pay with confidence. Instead, it's like getting a bill from Jiffy Lube that lists forty-five parts and service code numbers used to change your oil, with cryptic debits and credits, and then a tally line that is about twice as much as you would have expected. Would you pay the bill? No. Simply as that. Health providers expect otherwise, explaining that's is just too complicated to understand. Too complicated to post prices and too complicated to explain the price even after they know what it is.
How's your pricing? Does it make sense to you and everyone else involved in administering your company or does it make sense to your customers? If it requires more than ten seconds of explanation, you have room for improvement. Redo your pricing schedule by putting yourself in your customers shoes. What would make sense to them? What payment terms would be fair? Would they prefer more or less detail? Do product and services code need to be translated, at least for invoices and statements, into plain english? Do your product or service groupings make sense, whether the lack or proliferation thereof? If you offer discounting, is it consistent and are the qualifying parameters clear? If you rethink your pricing, invoices and statements from the customer's perspective, I bet you'll see your disputes go down and payments roll in faster.
A great set of posts...I wish every hospital CEO would read them.
Posted by: Jon Dale | Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 06:51 PM