The easier it is for patients to make payments, the more likely they are to pay providers, and the sooner too. Collecting more money, faster, helps increase overall revenue. In healthcare, “increasing patient responsibility” and “high-deductible health plans” are huge buzz phrases. The reason is that, today, patients are more directly responsible than they have been ever before for paying their healthcare expenses. According to Elizabeth Woodcock, a nationally recognized revenue cycle expert, “From 2007 through 2012, patients’ self-pay responsibility nearly tripled, rising from an average of 12 percent of practice revenue to just over 30 percent.” This means that, in order to remain profitable, practices need to be able to collect their patients’ financial payments one way or another. (source: ZirMed). Our cloud-based claims management partner, ZirMed®, continues to offer new services aimed at optimizing the financial performance of a medical practice. ZirMed’s Patient Payments solution offers several forms of payment, as well as options on how to accept these payments. Patient Payments creates an electronic receipt for each transaction that can be printed or provided to the patient through e-mail. Using ZirMed’s Patient Payments solution has several benefits: -Increase your collection rates by making it easier for patients to pay their obligations -Improve staff productivity due to more efficient payment processing and card on file capability -Reduce expenses by auto-posting patient payments, outsourcing low-value tasks, and benefiting from Patient Payments’ lower cost and feature rich, virtual terminal -Improve internal controls for detailed reporting, audit trails, and more For more information about improving patient collections, please contact Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver. Or, watch our 30 minute webinar recording on the topic.