The Journey

Making it easy for patients to pay in advance or at point of service leads to a number of well-documented advantages for both hospitals and patients. But most hospitals lack the ability to engage with patients in a meaningful conversation about price, affordability and payment when it matters most.

Physicians and other clinicians represent an important and often overlooked constituency in the debate about healthcare price transparency. With rising out-of-pocket costs causing patients to avoid, delay or ration care, doctors need information about price to design treatment plans their patients will actually follow.

Last week, in Authentic Patient Engagement, Pt. 1 - What It Is and How to Achieve It, I began this 2-part series exploring the modern patient’s heightened expectations of healthcare providers, along with the Loyale solutions that providers are leveraging to deliver it. This week, we’ll continue to examine patient expectations while digging more...

Chronic inefficiencies in the U.S. healthcare system are largely the product of fragmentation within the industry’s clinical, administrative and financial systems. Platform-enabled system integration has proven to be an essential remedy for providers determined to compete in the new healthcare economy.

Exploring the journey to becoming a patient-centered organization, Loyale Healthcare and a nationwide healthcare provider client recently presented to a gathering of industry leaders in Finance, Accounting and Revenue Cycle Management. The principles this provider applied to its patient financial engagement initiative represent a proven roadmap...

Surprise medical bills are red-hot for regulators and legislators, even the president. Despite the challenges of finding a solution, there’s some good news for providers and their patients. 

Patients are setting the bar higher than ever. They are demanding not only more transparency into hospitals’ clinical performance, but also greater convenience in all aspects of how they plan and pay for care. The shift to patient-driven revenue streams has introduced many new challenges for providers—but it has also created opportunities for...

Improving the financial dimension of the patient experience wasn’t a lifelong goal for me, and I didn’t start as a result of one single event. In fact, it was something of an accident that I took my career in this direction. But after I found myself on this path, I realized it was a goal to which I would be proud to commit my life. Here’s how...

The increase in patients’ individual financial responsibility poses a serious challenge to hospitals’ billing and collections practices, because institutional payers and individual patients behave in very different ways. Insurance companies and government payers require a lot of data in a structured, standardized process. Patients are much more...

Ronald Heifetz of the Harvard Kennedy School has argued that organizations experience two main types of change: technical and adaptive. Technical change in an organization is generally easier because the problem is clearly defined and the right solution can be achieved using existing skill sets and a known playbook or methodology.