Passport Adds to Software Suite with Payment Navigator
August 25, 2010
Patient Financial Triage Tool Analyzes Uninsured to Determine Best Payment
FRANKLIN, Tenn. – Passport Health Communications Inc. has launched a new health care revenue cycle solution called Payment Navigator. The software enables hospitals to avoid bad debt and reduce uncompensated care by performing an in-depth financial analysis for uninsured patients prior to service and recommending the best payment avenue – Medicaid, charity care, up-front collection or payment financing.
“There are 46 to 48 million uninsured Americans, the majority of whom depend on hospitals as their health care safety nets. Health care organizations must be proactive in managing their self-pay volume and properly categorizing patients who qualify for certain programs,” said Scott MacKenzie, CEO of Passport Health Communications Inc. “Payment Navigator assures that every patient is placed in the correct payment category during Patient Access, before treatment.”
In a recent American Hospital Association survey, 87 percent of hospitals reported increased bad debt and charity care as a percent of total gross revenue. Overall uncompensated care, according to AHA, has risen 69 percent since 2000. Passport research has shown, however, that approximately 10 percent of self-pay patients actually qualify for Medicaid, and other self-pay patients have the financial means to pay for their own care either in full or through a finance plan.
Payment Navigator performs a thorough up-front financial triage on all patients who claim they are unable to pay and alerts Patient Access staff when patients qualify for Medicaid or charity care. By automatically assessing every registration hospitals can catch 100 percent of Medicaid-eligible accounts pre-service, even in the emergency department and for high-volume outpatient procedures.
Passport has partnered with charity assessment and workflow companies Bluemark, LLC and TransEngen to streamline the screening and enrollment of Medicaid-eligible patients and automate the entire charity care application process. These tools can be launched automatically to help hospitals avoid writing off legitimate reimbursements and conserve valuable staff time by focusing only on patients who meet the required criteria.
Determining which patients meet specific charity care guidelines during the pre-service workflow also creates accountable charity care distribution. Reporting eligibility for specific charity cases is especially important among non-profit organizations during routine state and federal audits that set reimbursements and monitor tax-exempt status.
When patients don’t qualify for either Medicaid or charity care, Payment Navigator will check their ability and propensity to pay to and recommend whether full payment should be collected or an interest-free payment plan should be offered. Passport’s eCashiering solution processes cash, e-Check, credit and debit card payments and automatically calculates payment plans. Passport has also partnered with Aequitas Capital to enable the CarePayment interest-free medical credit card to be available to patients within Payment Navigator.
Integrating all of these tools increases up-front collections and workflow efficiency, as Patient Access staff can avoid trying to collect from patients who are truly unable to pay and ask the remaining population for out-of-pocket payments or offer financing options with confidence that they have been accurately assessed for charity care and Medicaid.
Payment Navigator operates on Web-based and integrated platforms within Passport’s eCare® Patient Access Suite. The solution triggers automatically when integrated with IntelliSource to improve workflow speed, efficiency and accuracy and reduce providers’ uncompensated care liability.
Please visit www.passporthealth.com for more information.
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