IngagePatient and Patient Focus Partner to Bring High Touch Patient Engagement to Hospital Billing

Nashville, TN (PRWEB) September 30, 2014

Responding to significant growth in the patient pay portion of hospital revenue, IngagePatient and PatientFocus have forged a partnership to help hospitals improve the patient's experience in managing the total cost of care.

"This is an opportunity to leverage patient engagement together with the last leg of the hospital billing cycle," says Justin Neece, president and chief operating officer of IngagePatient. "Through the combination of our offerings we are addressing a very antiquated process."

According to PatientFocus, on a national basis healthcare providers annually bill approximately $448 billion directly to patients, but only about 10 percent of that figure is ever collected. Together with IngagePatient, the partnership provides an online portal application to allow patients to pre-register, provide insurance information, understand what they will owe (out of pocket expense), and create a payment plan.

"IngagePatient is very consistent with our mission to treat patients like customers--their front-end, high-touch patient engagement platform is a perfect complement for our back-end billing solution," says David Frederiksen, chief executive officer of Nashville-based PatientFocus. "Patients will get a good idea of what they are going to owe, which makes it easier to pay the bill and, more importantly, preserves the relationship between patient and the hospital facility."

Using predictive analytics for each hospital client, PatientFocus manages 100% of the patient billing process on behalf of the client hospital and offers every patient interest-free payment plans with no application or credit check required. PatientFocus sends statements, text messages, and emails while managing inbound and outbound patient telephone calls. PatientFocus then harnesses the patient response data collected during the process not only to direct the hospital's communication efforts to those most likely to pay, but also to determine the most successful communication method(s) for each patient. These efforts have enabled PatientFocus to double their clients' patient-pay revenue.

The two companies are expected to begin offering their product suite to hospitals in the first quarter of 2015. "This partnership demonstrates the power of patient engagement in the billing cycle – another feature that distinguishes us as the premiere patient engagement platform," says IngagePatient's Neece.

About IngagePatient

IngagePatient is the premier patient engagement platform that connects providers and patients at all points of care, improving health outcomes, satisfaction and practice efficiency. The company's flagship offering supports a wide variety of specialty and primary care practices and patients across the United States. IngagePatient is sold directly to providers and health systems as well as through exclusive partnerships with EHR, Practice Management and Revenue Cycle Management companies. IngagePatient is a secure HIPAA compliant, web-based advanced patient engagement platform with an expansive set of features including a customizable eRegistration capability, flexible appointment reminders and care plan, medication refills alerts, integrated education delivery, eReferral capabilities, a robust personal health record, ePrescription refills requests, a practice Facebook web presence, a remote patient check-in capability and push population health management alerts. The platform is supported on both mobile and desktop devices and includes a full-featured patient mobile App. IngagePatient is a 2014 Edition Meaningful Use Stage 2 Modular certified platform with 20 criteria.

About Patient Focus

PatientFocus, based in Nashville, Tenn., is a medical billing company focused exclusively on self-pay and patient-pay accounts after insurance and before bad debt collections. Operating as a branded extension of clients' internal billing offices, PatientFocus leverages the latest data analytics, proprietary software solutions and compassion for our clients' patients to facilitate the self-pay billing process for both provider and patient. Our real-time analytics and predictive payment algorithms, along with user-friendly online payment tools and friendly, flexible approach to customer service, ensure increased cash collections and improve overall patient satisfaction. Online: http://www.patientfocus.com.

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/ingagepatient/patientfocus/prweb12199881.htm