PatientPay Helps D.C.-area Medical Group Adopt Paperless Billing
PatientPay’s Online Payment Solution Benefits Fairfax Ob-Gyn Associates and Patients
PatientPay, the leader in healthcare payment solutions, has helped a D.C.-area medical practice break its costly dependence on paper bills with the implementation of its paperless billing service, the company today announced.
Fairfax Ob-Gyn Associates P.C., a women’s health practice, employs state of the art technology on the clinical side of its operation but needed a significant upgrade to its billing and back-end reconciliation process. Before PatientPay, the practice’s billing company printed statements, stuffed them into envelopes, added postage and sent them to patients by “snail mail.” Along with this activity, error-prone manual data entry was used to reconcile the payments when they were received, typically in the industry standard time frame of at least 120 days.
The four month time frame between sending a bill and receipt of payment was putting added stress on the practice in terms of cash flow as their account receivables grew dramatically. “Most people don’t think of a medical group as a business,” said Tom Furr, PatientPay’s CEO. “Make no mistake; it is a business that must find ways to provide exceptional service to its customers, or patients, while continuing to innovate and operate profitably.”
Despite America’s growing preference to get bills – including those from their doctors – online, the overwhelming majority of U.S. medical practices send paper bills. A recent survey among American healthcare consumers by Deloitte, the management consultancy, found more than 70 percent of respondents want their bills in electronic form.
“Our practice has had a positive overall experience with PatientPay,” said Megan Colon, Fairfax Ob-Gyn Associates’ billing manager. “We love PatientPay and look forward to a long relationship with the team.” Some of that love comes from the fact the PatientPay solutions produces their bills for 44 percent less than a paper bill and those bills are paid in 13 days using PatientPay Paperless, 90 percent faster than paper bills.
A just-issued research study conducted by Physicians Practice, a medical practice management magazine, found that 66 percent of practices surveyed will not give more than cost of living raises to its staff members, citing decreasing reimbursements from payers and patients as the single greatest reason. The possible impact on retaining quality personnel in a practice is clear.
“Medical practices must move now into the age of paperless billing or no longer be able to serve their patients as they want, maintain a top-notch staff or succeed as a business,” Furr said.
Fairfax Ob-Gyn Associates maintains offices in Fair Oaks, Gainesville and Woodbridge, Virginia.
About PatientPay
PatientPay creates patient payment solutions that help patients, practices and hospitals and revenue cycle management services better control expenses in today’s healthcare environment.
Its solutions yield greater operational and financial efficiency for healthcare providers while giving patients a simple way to manage their healthcare-related financial obligations. The billing, payment and reporting services are HIPAA and PCI Level 1 compliant and eliminate time-intensive, error-prone, manual back-end efforts to process and reconcile paper bills or manage a traditional online portal.
PatientPay was founded in 2008 to bring to healthcare consumers the same type of payment solutions they use in retail and e-commerce environments. In 2012 PatientPay was granted three patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 8,155,983, 8,204,764 and 8,214,233) for its innovative process that underpins its solutions, which can be integrated with any healthcare management software.
The company is headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.patientpay.com or call (888) 730-9374.