customer story
Jacksonville’s Baptist Health Collects Over $1M in Self-Pay Per Month
Baptist Health Drives Better Patient Satisfaction with Direct MobilePay
Since 1955, Baptist Health has been the center of patient-centered care in Jacksonville, Fla. Now comprising six hospitals, 200 primary care, and specialty office locations, and more than 200 access points of care for patients, Baptist Health is consistently ranked as the most preferred healthcare organization in Jacksonville.
It’s a designation the Baptist team takes seriously to uphold by living their mission to continually improve the lives of the people in their communities. One particular value of Baptist Health is a northstar for both Philip Boyce, chief revenue officer, and Susan Higginbotham, director of revenue cycle management:
Exceed the quality and service expectations of those we serve through inclusive and innovative efforts, constant evaluation of results, and celebration of achievements.
Enable Patients to Simply Pay Their Bills
As patient responsibility continually increased as a part of the organization’s overall revenue, the Baptist Health revenue cycle team took it upon themselves to find a better way to enable patients to pay their bills.
Because they already had existing payment channels like mailed paper statements, a call center, and even payment through a portal, Boyce and Higginbotham wanted a mobile payment option that would be easy for patients.
The only problem: every mobile payment solution they looked at took the same approach of sending a text notification that led to an online portal patients have to log into. It was just too much friction for patients, Boyce and Higginbotham felt. None of the solutions they looked at measured up to the value of providing patients exceptional and innovative high-quality service.
In short: the team wanted a patient payment approach that would be a huge driver of patient satisfaction when they had to pay their bills. They wanted to delight patients with the payment experience and not necessarily engage them in it.
A New Patient Payment Channel
A chance encounter at a conference turned them on to MobilePay and as Boyce says, “it was like nothing we had seen before.” Almost immediately, Boyce was intrigued by the possibilities. MobilePay wasn’t just reinventing existing payment channels for them, it was something entirely new.
“You don’t have to go to a portal,” Boyce says. “You can make a payment right from the text. Why not offer that option to patients?”
With MobilePay, Baptist Health quickly gave patients a text messaging-based approach to delivering both patient statements and the ability to pay those bills directly with no additional app to download or portal to log into.
Rather than reinvent existing payment channels or replace revenue cycle infrastructure already invested in, MobilePay easily integrated into their technology stack and immediately improved the revenue cycle team’s self-pay collection strategy.
“MobilePay is a payment channel we didn’t have,” says Boyce.
A Huge Patient Satisfaction Win for the RCM Team
Baptist Health went live on MobilePay in September 2019. Boyce remembers exactly when he knew it would be a hit with patients. The second day after go-live his wife was texted her bill from a recent visit to Baptist. “I thought, okay, this will be a good test to see how it goes,” Boyce recalls, “Not even a minute later she had paid her bill and that was all the proof I needed. She had no problems. It was so easy for her.”
Now, nearly two years later, Baptist Health is generating more than a million dollars per month in patient self-pay revenue through MobilePay and more than 21% of its patient responsibility is paid through that channel alone.
“The other way the revenue team measures the impact of MobilePay is from the cost savings of not having to mail two or three paper statements to collect on small dollar bills. There’s a benefit because we’re not having to spend the time chasing smaller dollars when it can be convenient for them to pay,” says Boyce.
While all those financial and operational results help sell MobilePay internally, the biggest way to measure MobilePay’s success is via the patients themselves. “Patients rave about it,” says Higginbotham.
