Hospital systems and the entire healthcare industry’s staffing shortages are escalating amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. With fewer patient financial service team members available to serve patient payment needs, facilities’ bottom lines are suffering.
Healthcare professionals, office managers, and even billing and collection departments, are all under pressure due to staffing shortages, but there are other problems as well. Team member burnout, vaccination mandates, and adjusting to work from home scenarios are hitting them all at once. In fact, this staffing crisis will be hospital’s greatest challenge of 2022, according to the HFMA and Healthleadersmedia.com.
Mercer predicts that 6.5 million healthcare workers will leave the industry by 2026.
There will only be 1.9 million workers replacing them, according to Mercer’s “2021 External Healthcare Labor Market Analysis.”
Providers now also have to race to ensure their billing practices comply with the No Surprises Act, the new law banning unexpected medical charges from out-of-network providers, which went into effect on January 1, 2022. Together, these challenges are placing every healthcare facility in a financial conundrum of monumental size.
How Staffing Shortages Negatively Impact Patient Revenue Streams
The ongoing labor shortages will only exacerbate the industry’s existing payments problem: nearly all medical facilities still rely on a reactive, antiquated, manual paper-based system of billing.
Staffing resources are so stretched that providers struggle to even keep their doors open, let alone, collect on open balances. At the same time, providers also expected to maintain their reputations in the eyes of patients faced with medical debt.
Can providers strike a balance that delivers on revenue goals and while improving reputation?
The increasing payment and collection gap can either lead to stunted growth or innovation. This economic environment makes it difficult to have an end-to-end in-house patient financial solution. This is why providers need a disrupter like Cap Care Plus to enhance their revenue cycle team’s current efforts. Care Cap Plus delivers quality and efficiency via a new hybrid approach.
How the Cap Care Plus Hybrid Approach Helps Providers
Care Cap Plus responds to the collection services needs between billing statements and attorney or “hard” collections. We focus on getting to know the patient first. Then we meet them where they are at financially to achieve a mutually acceptable payment plan. Care Cap Plus blends automation and cutting-edge technology with old fashioned customer service to supercharge traditional billing and collection processes.
How do providers benefit from patient-first billing and collection?
Patients get access to personalized, non-predatory payment options delivered in a strategic, proactive and multi-channel process.
Care Cap Plus Creates a ‘Patient-Friendly’ Billing Reputation for Providers
Care Cap Plus can be made available to any patient prior to treatment or with open receivables from 30 to 180 days after insurance has been paid or exhausted.
88% of patients that were offered Care Cap Plus say they would choose that hospital again because it offers Care Cap Plus.
Facilities that are using this are reducing patients sent to attorney collections and preserving their reputation in their community. In fact, 88% of patients that were offered Care Cap Plus say they would choose that hospital again because it offers Care Cap Plus.
Providers must act now to plan and prepare for mitigating the payment problem.
If providers want to mitigate the effects of the staffing shortages, now is the time to supplement your current revenue cycle team. The cost savings and reputation benefits of Cap Care Plus are likely to become essential for healthcare facilities facing ongoing limited resources and staff.