You care for your patients, and they know it. They know they can come to your practice, receive the help they need, and then go home healthier and happier.

But then they get their bill. The complexity and frustration that often accompanies paying medical bills can decrease your patient's satisfaction with their experience with you.

Why? Because the Patient Financial Experience is woven throughout the larger Patient Experience. It’s often on your patients’ minds from the first moment they need care until it’s all done and paid for. And these days, paying medical bills can be frustratingly complex, even for the most savvy patients.

That’s why we’re passionate about improving the Patient Financial Experience. It’s our mission to take complexity out of the process and increase patient satisfaction at the point where patient satisfaction is most likely to be negatively impacted.

Knowing what your patients go through to pay their bills is critical to understanding why, or why not, patients pay on time. This process can involve getting their costs up front, receiving insurance preauthorization, and making payment arrangements.

Many of these systems and processes tend to operate within unrelated departments and are often difficult to coordinate. It’s helpful to go through the process of mapping the entire journey, beginning to end, from a patient's perspective. Wixcorp offers this as a FREE service to help you get your PFX improvement efforts started.

Patients can be complicated. Their diverse needs, perspectives, and resources can be hard to juggle, especially when trying to design a great experience for them.

So, how to go about it? First, determine what you already know. What data do you have about them? Demographics? Procedures? Surveys? Use the best customer-listening resources available to you. If necessary, build that listening path as you go.

We use all of these resources to develop a set of Customer Segments – categories that encompass your patient populations. Those segments are unique to your practice based on the types of patients you serve.

From those segments, we learn the following: What do you know about why each segment of patients comes to see you? How did they find you, and why did they choose to do business with you? How did it go? How do they feel about their experience?

With Customer Segments, Personas, and Journey Maps in place, you now have a consistent framework that every group in your organization can rally around and design for. You now have a single-voice standard that coordinates and guides your enterprise improvement efforts.

And, importantly, you now have a simplified approach that you can attach the ROI of your actions to, because—let’s face it—none of this will get anywhere if there isn’t a financial benefit to it. Nor should it.

The entire practice of Experience Management is designed to generate actionable insights that fuel customer acquisition and growth.