pricing strategies for patient portal

What is a patient portal and how does it work?

Sep 11, 2018 · The truth about the cost of implementing a patient portal is that, it really shouldn’t cost anything. The Cost of a Patient Portal. The truth about the cost of a patient portal is that it does not, and should not, have to cost a provider a dime. Each component of a physician’s office technology is related and should work together to make sure physicians are offering quality …

Why is strategic pricing important for health plans and providers?

Deployment strategies and pricing. Patient portal vendors often package the software as part of an integrated EHR suite that includes other applications; however, the patient portal functionality can also be purchased as a stand-alone or “best-of-breed” program. If you go with a stand-alone system, it’s important for you to make sure it can integrate with the EHR you’re already using.

How can health plans use reference pricing strategies to optimize rates?

Jan 01, 2021 · Once the relevant price and quality information are available, employers and health plans can increase the likelihood that patients will shop for service through a range of patient incentive plans including patient rebates (e.g., cash payment or gift cards) to reference pricing strategies. The medical loss ratio (MLR) rebate policy is designed to support health plans in …

How do you develop a pricing strategy?

Three Strategies to Make Portals Work. Interoperability—The ability to acquire patient data from multiple sources, aggregate the data in one place, normalize the data and make the information available to providers, payers and patients in a single view. Integration—Portals and other patient engagement applications must be integrated into a ...

How much does it cost to implement patient portal?

Holmes estimates portal costs in the range of $30-$40 per provider per month, on average. Some vendors charge a fee per patient per month. Partly to compensate for this extra cost, some practices charge patients for viewing their own records on the portal.Apr 29, 2015

How do you market a patient portal?

Seven tips on how to promote your patient portal Add a tag line to appointment cards, statements, newsletters, and other communication. An example: “Tired of playing phone tag? Sign up for the patient portal.” Change your practice's on-hold messaging to include information introducing the patient portal.

How do you improve patient portals?

Here are some ways to encourage patient enrollment:Include information about the patient portal on your organization's website.Provide patients with an enrollment link before the initial visit to create a new account.Encourage team members to mention the patient portal when patients call to schedule appointments.More items...•Jun 25, 2020

What is the best patient portal?

athenaCommunicatorHealthcare IT rating agency KLAS recently selected athenahealth's athenaCommunicator as the #1 patient portal, with a score of 91.8 on the most recent Best in KLAS awards . athenahealth's suite was also ranked #2 overall for practice sizes from 1-75 physicians.

How can we improve patient registration process?

Here are some steps you can take to assess and improve your workflow.Assess your practice's waiting room. ... Review your existing digital capabilities. ... Reflect on your patient registration workflow. ... Identify hang-ups in the patient registration process. ... Train staff on patient registration best practices.More items...•Jun 9, 2021

How can I find a patient online?

5 apps that you can use to consult doctors onlinePracto. Practo is one of the popular telemedicine apps in the market. ... Lybrate. Another popular telemedicine app is Lybrate. ... Mfine. Mfine is a healthcare platform that offers professional diagnostics and telemedicine services. ... Tata Health. ... Doctor 24x7.Jun 3, 2021

How do you optimize patient portals for patient engagement and meet meaningful use requirements?

Meet Meaningful Use Requirements The portal must be engaging and user- friendly, and must support patient-centered outcomes. The portal also must be integrated into clinical encounters so the care team uses it to convey information, communicate with patients, and support self-care and decision-making as indicated.

How is patient portal success measured?

To be successful, they should be assessed using measures that span across improvements in patient and family engagement (e.g., overall use and satisfaction with use and care), clinical outcomes, and operational efficiency.

What safeguards are in place for patient portals?

Patient portals have privacy and security safeguards in place to protect your health information. To make sure that your private health information is safe from unauthorized access, patient portals are hosted on a secure connection and accessed via an encrypted, password-protected logon.

What are the different types of patient portals?

Top patient portal vendors include Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, and Epic.READ MORE: Patient Portal Benefits in Pediatric Care Must Fuel Parent Use.Accenture Federal Services. ... Allscripts. ... Athenahealth. ... Cerner Corporation. ... READ MORE: Patient Portal Use Lagging Despite Strong Provider Support.CPSI. ... Epic Systems.More items...•Apr 28, 2017

What is Athena patient portal?

Online patient portal With a patient portal, patients can make appointments and get appointment reminders, view and update personal information, request prescriptions, receive test results, and read patient education material.

What is Cerner's patient portal called?

HealtheLifeHealtheLife. The Cerner patient portal offering, HealtheLifeSM, is a web-based solution that enables interaction and engagement between health care organizations and people in their population.

What is the new healthcare transparency regulation?

The new regulations, set to go into effect January 1, 2021, require hospitals to publish a list of all standard hospital charges, including patient responsibility estimates and negotiated rates with payors, in a consumer-friendly format. While many providers likely reacted in shock to the recent Federal judges’ rejection of the American Hospital Association lawsuit 6 filed to dispute this requirement, initiating a legal battle or meeting the bare minimum requirement is only a short-term solution. It is important to take a step back and observe the larger market landscape: Information transparency efforts are intended to accelerate market disruption, and providers that ignore the new requirements may be caught in an unfavorable competitive position trying to regain market share from their more innovative counterparts. To address public trust and regulatory considerations, providers must drive toward greater transparency in their patient communications, their charge structures, and their overall pricing strategy.

How many people do not have a PCP?

A Kaiser Foundation poll found that 45% of 18- to 29-year-olds did not have a PCP compared to only 12% of 65+ year-olds. 15 Younger individuals also often prefer “alternative” health care delivery options, such as virtual telemedicine and urgent care with weekend and evening hours.

What is Deloitte Services?

As consumers increasingly shop for health care services, providers have an opportunity to build trust with their patients and differentiate their organizations by leading the way on pricing transpare ncy.

What is Deloitte Consulting?

Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Health Care Pricing Practice leads our provider, physician practice, and planclients through a full suite of pricing services with a goal of improving the affordability of health carethrough information transparency and data-driven decision-making. As a core part of our end-to-endRevenue Cycle solution, our work includes traditional strategic pricing solutions, managed carecontracting analytics, chargemaster standardization, and full pricing transformations.

What happened to Maria on a ski trip?

It's a story we’ve heard before. Maria was on a ski trip with her friends when she hit a patch of ice and fell, tweaking her shoulder in the process. She waited a few days to see if her mobility would improve, but it soon became clear that she will have to visit a doctor soon. Maria’s primary care physician provided multiple referrals, but she was surprised to discover that few of the recommended providers had price or quality information readily available on their website. Even when she called, she was only referred to a hard-to-interpret set of list prices and told to contact her insurer.

Is OOP liability a critical element of provider selection?

While OOP liability is clearly a critical element of provider selection , consumers do take a holistic view of the options available to them. When we tested the trade-off between OOP payment and quality in a market share simulation, we found that respondents generally preferred lower-cost, lower-quality providers over higher-cost, higher-quality counterparts. However, when looking specifically at providers with the highest list prices, this effect reverses. Put more simply, respondents were willing to pay more out of pocket for quality if the corresponding list price was higher, anchoring the respondents at a starting higher price. This finding illustrates the value of providing transparent information, and when used effectively with other data points, list prices can serve as an anchor to highlight and attract patients to superior-quality providers. This result may also indicate that fears of a “race to the bottom” with price transparency are premature; rather, transparency provides an opportunity for high-quality providers to command higher prices by thinking strategically about how to share pricing information with patients in conjunction with other tools such as marketing and patient experience efforts.

What is strategic pricing?

Strategic pricing approach. To realize the market opportunities in today’s consumer-driven healthcare industry, providers require a pricing strategy that gives them an advantage in appealing to consumers, who can now shop for health plan products and make choices among different providers for healthcare services.

What is the new CMS price transparency rule?

The new CMS price transparency rules represent a critical first step in providing price transparency for patients. The market environment is ripe for change, and health plans are poised to support patients interested in shopping for high-quality, cost-effective care. First, however, providers and health plans must make necessary changes that enable patients to access high-value care.

When will healthcare price transparency take effect?

15, 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) posted a final rule on Hospital Price Transparency and a proposed rule on Transparency in Coverage for health plans, which are set to take effect Jan. 1, 2021. a These new rules require unprecedented levels of transparency of negotiated rates, which will have far-reaching impacts on the healthcare system now and in the post-COVID-19 healthcare market. Providers and health plan executives should fully understand how their organizations will be affected and how best to prepare to take advantage of this looming disruption.

What is the goal of financial analysis?

Conduct financial analysis. The goal for providers is to understand service and site-level financial data, including revenue, cost (variable and fixed) and margin. The goal for health plans is to determine the financial opportunity from alternative sites of care initiatives and reallocation of pricing services.

MIPS and Patient Portals

Use your portal to help achieve some of the MIPS advancing care information (ACI) mea­sures and improvement activities.

Strategy 2: Monitor Your Portal

Plan ahead. One of the greatest errors a practice can make is setting up a portal without first determining how it will be used to interact with patients and who on your staff should be involved with its day-to-day use, cautioned Mr. Daigrepont.

Strategy 3: Market Your Portal

No matter how functional and well honed your portal is, implementation will not be effective without a mar­keting campaign that involves patient education and portal promotion.

Strategy 4: Learn From Your Portal

All correspondence that comes in to or goes out of your practice via the portal is documented within the system, so relevant reports can easily be generated.

Why is patient engagement important?

Patient engagement is a necessary element for the achievement of a better quality of care and it is a critical component of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) initiative to focus on the quality of care. CMS programs like the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, MACRA, are fundamentally changing the reimbursement matrix for healthcare in the United States by shifting the focus from fee for service to reimbursement for quality. Thus, determining the right patient engagement solution has become increasingly important for healthcare organizations.

What is the role of a physician in patient engagement?

A recent survey by the New England Journal of Medicine Insights Council, found that physician buy-in is essential to the adoption of patient engagement technology. Patients are much more likely to use a new technology if their physician wants them to use it. It is important to note that the physician’s role does not end after suggesting a new patient engagement technology, many patients will require reinforcement of the idea. For example, once patients are using a patient portal, their physician should mention the portal at each visit and specifically refer to a feature in which the patient might find value.

How does a patient care coordinator help a patient?

If your healthcare organization uses patient care coordinators to promote health awareness and help patients reach their care goals , you know how integral these individuals are to successful patient engagement technology implementation. Care Coordinators work with the physician and patient to develop a care plan, they communicate the provider’s plan to the patient, and they continually assess the patient’s needs. They also play a vital role in adoption of patient engagement technology by by promoting patient portal features that open lines of communication and streamline care plan management.

What is pricing strategy?

This pricing strategy involves selling a product or service at two or more prices. Provided such difference in pricing is not due to a difference in manufacturing a product or rendering a service. Rather prices are adjusted based on the customer segment, location and timing when a product is offered.

How to determine pricing strategy?

A right pricing strategy helps you determine the price point at which you can maximize profits on sales of your product or service. You need to consider a wide range of factors when setting prices of your offerings. These include: 1 production and distribution costs, 2 competitor offerings, 3 positioning strategies and 4 the business’ target customer base.

Why is price skimming important?

You then drop the prices eventually to attract more price-sensitive consumers. Not only does price skimming help your small business recoup its development costs.

What is the most challenging phase of pricing?

The most challenging phase of setting a pricing strategy is that of product introduction. During this phase, marketers face the challenge of setting prices of business offerings for the first time.

How does penetration pricing work?

Many new companies use this technique to draw attention away from their competition. But penetration pricing does lead to an initial loss of income for the business.

Why do some industries have by-products?

Some industries generate by-products as a result of manufacturing goods. These by-products hold no value at times and it is a costly affair to dispose them off. This scenario may lead to increasing the cost of the core product. However, a company can sell these by-products to make for the higher cost of disposing them off by using by-product pricing. Thus, this makes the price of the core product competitive.

What is price skimming?

Price skimming involves setting rates high during the introductory phase. This is designed to help businesses maximize sales on new products and services. Once the products or services are introduced, company lowers the prices gradually. This is done eventually as competitor goods appear on the market.