Digitizing Your Billing Helps Support the Planet

On April 22, 2021, the world celebrates Earth Day, an annual event to support environmental protection. The theme for Earth Day 2021 is Restore Our Earth, which is a call to take the necessary steps today to keep the planet healthy for tomorrow.

At the same time, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are an increasingly important part of an organization’s performance beyond the black-and-white lines of a profit-and-loss statement, challenging executives to measure the value their businesses create in the context of more fundamental ethical values.

For healthcare organizations, an ESG framework is inextricably linked with patient care, since a healthy population is dependent on a healthy earth. The CFA institute stated it perfectly – there is no one exhaustive list of ESG examples. ESG factors are often interlinked, and it can be challenging to classify an ESG issue as only on environmental, social, or governance issue, as the table below shows. (Table adapted from cfainstitute.org)¹

These and other initiatives recognize the fact that running a good healthcare business requires a sense of communal responsibility.

For example, the diagnostic and remote patient monitoring industry can contribute through the efficiency of resources, especially when it comes to paper billing. Even though the capability to digitize billing has existed for some time, paper receipts, in general, still add up to approximately 686 million pounds of waste per year, according to the environmental group Treehugger.² More specifically, another estimate says that a typical diagnostic billing cycle results in three invoices per patient.

For some healthcare organizations, that’s a lot of paper and a direct opportunity related to the ESG factors listed above and certainly contributes to the bottom line with avoidable costs.

But the benefits of digitizing your revenue process don’t stop there. Getting rid of paper billing can enhance data security, reduce your overall carbon footprint, and accelerate operations and payments.

How XiFin Helps Diagnostic Providers Fight Waste

XiFin solutions support ESG programs by helping diagnostic providers to transition their manual or paper-based processes and digitizing them to save costs and increase transaction speed. Here are two examples:

XiFin Portals and Invoicing

In the past, a patient would receive a bill or lab results, which often set off a volley of communications. For big diagnostic providers, this requires enormous resources. XiFin offers portals for specific audiences to address these issues. Each portal aims to enable diagnostic providers to better serve their patients and referring physicians as well as facilitate collecting of balances as quickly as possible with fewer resources. The portals also allow diagnostic providers to grow their business without increasing their staffing at the same rate by improving efficiency and effectiveness.

The Patient Portal lets patients view their billing, diagnostic test results, review their estimated out-of-pocket expense for their encounters or tests as well as setting up billing preferences like paperless billing, make credit card payments and set up or manage payment plans.

The Client Portal helps labs more deeply integrate communications and data exchange to correct information – all without generating paper. This helps improve turn-around time for missing or incorrect information and ultimately accelerate reimbursements while supporting ESG programs.

Patient Estimator

Another way XiFin helps labs to reduce resources is by providing a Patient Estimator tool. This sophisticated estimator leverages the essential data required to calculate the forecast of patient responsibility more accurately. An email notification is sent to the patient when the patient’s responsibility estimate is ready to be viewed. There is also a text option, which communicates the estimate is ready for viewing in near real-time to the patient. The bottom line is that an accurate bill will result in less back and forth, thus saving valuable resources — both paper and staff time.

These are just a few examples. To learn more about efficient billing, explore XiFin RPM, a comprehensive, award-winning accounts receivable and financial management solution.

Want to learn more about our Patient Estimator tool? Read this blog post.

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