In this episode

Patients are paying for a larger share of their healthcare than ever before, and the patient financial experience is an increasingly important part of the care journey. Patrick Drewry is a healthcare financial industry veteran and the VP of Product – Patient Access & Financial Clearance at Optum. In this episode, he discusses what makes a great patient financial experience. He covered the following themes:

• The need to eliminate “points of abrasion” in the patient experience.
• The positive trend toward enabling patients to self-serve, both throughout their care journeys and specifically for financial needs.
• The need for integration between health IT vendors to improve the financial experience.

Key takeaways

In his role at Optum, Patrick Drewry is always thinking about how to improve the patient financial experience. In particular, he discussed the need to eliminate “points of abrasion” that patients experience throughout their healthcare journeys. Here are his takeaways:

The financial experience is intertwined with the entire patient care journey.

“Insurance verification, out-of-pocket estimates, prior authorization, all these things can be a point of abrasion for providers, patients, and payers alike…there’s so many points in healthcare, and in the financial domain it begins at the point at which the patient is getting on the schedule,” Drewry said.

From the start of the patient journey, tasks like verifying the patient’s insurance benefits and coverage affect the financial end of the experience, Drewry pointed out. He acknowledged that the uncertainty of healthcare billing is a continued challenge for patients, and emphasized that unlike in another setting where prices might be more transparent, financial journey steps can impact the patient’s care.

“Just being able to make sense of, what do you expect your out-of-pocket expense to be for this healthcare event, that’s a question we’ve been trying to answer for the last 15+ years,” Drewry said. “If you think about your experience with just about any other sort of retail environment, you don’t have a likely higher-than-normal expenditure where you don’t know what it’s going to cost.”

“Solving for these points of abrasion by engaging the patient pre-service can help mitigate downstream consequences like delayed care, lack of payment,” Drewry said.

“‘Patient financial experience’ is sort of a misnomer. It’s really just the patient experience,” Drewry pointed out.

Patient self-service and better vendor collaboration represent major opportunities to improve the financial journey.

“The demand we’re hearing from the patient is, ‘Let us do it ourselves.’ Patients want to have either a validation check or the opportunity to input the information themselves, which we love, because we see no better source of accurate information,” Drewry said. “Step one is to meet that demand.”

“The next step is, we have to get more connected,” Drewry said.

“The byproduct of how technology has evolved in the last few years, everyone came to the realization at the same time: Our patients need to have some sort of self-service option for our specific function. So all at once, all these different technologies have the ability to text. But it creates a disharmonized experience for the patient. It creates an experience where the patient ends up filling in or validating the same information over and over. So we have to be able to integrate and interoperate, and take information from the patient and connect it through the entire journey, regardless of where you’re sourcing the information or who your technology vendor is.”