Navicure, a leading healthcare billing and payment solutions provider for hospitals, physician practices and billing companies, announced the availability of Navicure Payments, a software platform facilitating the patient payments process. The software is designed to allow healthcare organizations to estimate patient payment amounts and to enable efficient and effective collection of those payments. By using Navicure Payments, organizations can reduce bad debt and the costs associated with patient collections, while accelerating cash flow from patient accounts.
This new tool helps healthcare organizations better manage the continued increase of patient financial responsibility and the challenges associated with this trend. According to a National Center for Health Statistics study from 2013, 32.5 percent of people under the age of 65 with private health insurance were enrolled in high-deductible health plans, increasing from only 19.2 percent in 2008. Since these plans require a higher out-of-pocket payment from patients, practices need new payment policies, technology and processes to collect amounts owed before it becomes bad debt. On average, 20-30 percent of patient accounts are written off as bad debt today.
Navicure Payments enables healthcare organizations to collect the entire amount owed from patients, and makes the process faster and easier than many traditional patient collections models. Specifically, Navicure Payments users are able to:
- Estimate patient financial responsibility at the time of service without having to enter or manage complex payer contracts, providing patients with price transparency.
- Secure patients’ commitment to pay at the time of service reducing future bad debt write-offs, allowing organizations to configure payment plans that can run automatically and conform to established guidelines.
- Collect previous balances or co-pays before service via debit, credit or ACH payments, improving accounts receivables.
- Collect balances after insurance adjudication using securely stored card information, avoiding costly statements or collections.
“Patients are now among the healthcare industry’s largest payers, in some cases surpassing Medicare and Medicaid,” said Jim Denny, co-founder and CEO of Navicure. “To continue to thrive, healthcare organizations must collect patient payments at or near the time of service and no longer rely solely on patient statements, which can come months after care and long after the patient remembers what procedures were performed. Throughout our history, Navicure has been dedicated to helping organizations collect more revenue from payers faster and with less effort. Now we’re doing the same with regards to collecting from patients with the launch of Navicure Payments.”
