Leading Lab Improves Patient Experience with Inbox Health

Summary

Your Health Lab (YHL), a leading clinical diagnostic laboratory serving the state of Texas, was looking for ways to make medical bills, and the billing process, more transparent for patients and providers. They wanted a better way to engage patients following the diagnostics service and the subsequent adjudication process. YHL understood that by keeping their patients happy, their doctors would be happy as well. This led to YHL collaborating with Inbox Health to provide a comprehensive patient engagement solution. The incremental increase in patient comprehension lead to happier patients and providers, 39% more collection from patient bills, and a near elimination of patient billing support calls.

The Challenge

Your Health Lab is one of the leading diagnostic labs based in Texas, serving more than 10,000 patients a month. The Lab’s patient-centric approach is based on extending in network prices to every patient. It is this approach that also has YHL continually on the look-out for ways to improve the quality of service. YHL is acutely aware of the increasing patient responsibility from Payers, and the strain it imposes on their patients. In fact, a 2019 TransUnion Healthcare study showed that out-of-pocket costs increased 12% year-over-year. Medical providers want their billing departments to make it easy for their patients to understand and pay these increasing medical costs. This is why YHL decided to perform billing services in-house. But they wanted to add personalized service and transparency to ensure patients receive the best billing experience possible.

“We’re entering an era of more and more patient responsibility, and it is constantly evolving and changing. As a medical provider, we look at it as our responsibility to educate our patients to make it easy to understand patient costs, and Inbox Health is a key component to doing this the right way.” 

- James Gietz, CEO, Your Health Lab 

 

The Solution

Your Health Lab needed to make their billing service a point of differentiation in an already crowded medical lab market. They realized that most other medical billers didn’t provide easy to understand bills – and they didn’t make it easy for patients to pay in more ways than just credit card and check. There was a need – and an opportunity - to help the patient better understand increased patient responsibility and the overall billing process. To do this effectively required a better understanding of how each patient preferred to be communicated with, when they wanted that communication, and how often the communication needed to go out to influence a payment. YHL decided that it would be better to find a company that specialized in understanding patient payment preferences, and tailoring billing practices to those preferences. Integration with the YHL financial information system (Healthpac) was mandatory. 

Your Health Lab prides itself on providing white-glove service to all of its patients so it was important that they teamed with a company with similar standards for top-of-the-line service.

The ideal vendor would offer top of the line patient engagement and enhanced statement technology. Unfortunately, all of the companies they looked at came up short. After a recommendation, YHL met up with Inbox Health at the annual Healthpac conference and finally found what they were looking for.  Inbox Health addressed every need with a variety of forward-thinking solutions and met the high standards of engagement that YHL required for all of their patients.

Inbox Health integrated with Your Health Lab’s Healthpac instance and overhauled the patient billing process in just a few short days after signing the contract.

The Results

Your Health Lab noticed the difference right away. Statements started to go out daily instead of weekly or monthly, and patient interaction had new dimensions. Patients found it much easier to understand their bills, and to get quick answers when they had a question. This led to a 39.4% increase in patient payments and a radical decrease in the posting process through automated payment posting by Inbox Health.  The revenue cycle dramatically decreased while posting errors and patient phone calls to the YHL billing department dropped to nearly zero.  This freed up the billing team to focus on serving patients better and building on the success of their business.

Being patient-centric, Your Health Lab was excited when they began to notice the enhanced outpatient experience with Inbox Health. Patients received clearer statements through the communication channels they preferred.  YHL was reaching their patients in new ways with increased cost transparency and easy to use payment methods, thus continuing on their foundation of providing the best service for every patient.