Lift the financial burden from patients while boosting your practice's bottom line by offering financing for medical procedures.
What's one of the most common reasons patients hesitate to seek medical care? For many healthcare providers, the answer is clear: financial concerns. The high costs of healthcare and medical procedures are a heavy burden for many patients. Even those with insurance often struggle to pay out of pocket for needed care. But there is a way to change this dynamic—to lift the financial burden from patients while boosting your bottom line. By offering patient financing options, you can make essential and elective treatments accessible to more patients.
This approach also helps your patients and enhances your practice’s revenue, creating a win-win situation. Implementing patient payment plans can transform financial stress into financial relief, ensuring timely patient care and steady income for your practice.
The Benefits of Patient Financing Options
One of the main benefits of offering patient financing options is that it helps practices attract more patients and increase case acceptance rates. When cost is no longer standing in a patient's way, this opens up opportunities for new revenue streams for the practice. Patient financing programs can help do the following:
- Attract New Patients. Offering financing shows patients that the practice understands their financial limitations and is willing to work with them. This builds trust and satisfaction, leading to referrals and repeat visits.
- Increase Case Acceptance Rates. Patients are more likely to move forward with treatments and procedures that have been recommended by their medical provider when they are presented with payment plans that make care more accessible.
- Grow Revenue. By improving case acceptance rates, practices can generate more revenue from procedures that may have been delayed or declined due to upfront costs.
- Improve Collections. Instead of losing revenue from unpaid medical bills, financing allows practices to work with patients and collect payments over time through payment plans.
Offering patient financing options has proven to be an effective strategy for healthcare practices to drive multiple beneficial outcomes. By providing extended payment plans, practices can increase treatment acceptance rates among patients, boost overall revenue, elevate patient satisfaction levels, and improve collections on balances owed.
Enhancing Patient Accessibility and Satisfaction
Patient financing options intentionally serve a purpose: to increase patient access. In practices where treatment was once reserved for those who could pay in full, flexible financing now allows more patients to overcome financial barriers.
This change also comes from a changing mindset around the patient experience. Healthcare practices are recognizing that cost concerns affect not only a patient's ability to access treatment but also their satisfaction and loyalty. Providers now focus on reducing financial anxiety throughout the healthcare journey.
Having clear pricing and financing options available upfront allows patients to budget and plan for a procedure. This also avoids stressful billing surprises down the line.
With more people being responsible for higher proportions of their medical bills, having solutions like flexible payment plans is becoming a major asset to healthcare practices.
Today, patients have more choices, and this positions financing as a strategic advantage. Satisfied patients become repeat patients and willing referrers. They are more engaged in their care and more likely to follow treatment plans. By expanding access and reducing financial burdens, financing options strengthen the patient-provider relationship from the beginning.
How to Implement Patient Financing in Your Practice
Integrating patient financing options requires some key steps to ensure successful adoption and maximize the revenue impact.
- Select a financing partner carefully by evaluating factors like interest rates, payment plan flexibility, application experience, reputation, and integration capabilities.
- Provide training to all staff members who will discuss financing options with patients.
- Have training sessions and provide employee resources.
- Write out suggested patient conversations and develop conversation guides for staff discussing financing availability. Make sure you also have consistent and compliant messaging.
- Update patient forms, documents, and pre-visit information to reflect the new financing options. Make patients aware upfront.
- Market the new financing program across your website, social media channels, emails, as well as other patient communications. Use language highlighting the increased affordability.
- Monitor key metrics like financing application rates, approval rates, and revenue impact after launch. Improve processes as needed based on performance data.
Offering patient financing can make care more accessible, while also benefiting your practice through better collections, increased patients, and marketing differentiation. Following these steps will help you successfully implement financing in your medical practice.
Legal and Regulatory Considerations
When implementing patient financing options in your medical practice, it is important to remain compliant with relevant healthcare regulations and follow best practices.
- Healthcare financing programs must comply with federal and state laws related to lending, debt collection, and consumer protection. A few relevant regulations include the Truth in Lending Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and state consumer lending laws.
- The Stark Law and Anti-Kickback Statute prohibit improper financial relationships that are intended to bring about patient referrals. Select a reputable financing partner to ensure financing arrangements are carefully structured to avoid violations.
In addition to legal compliance, your practice must also follow some best practices when offering financing:
- Provide clear communication to patients about financing terms, costs, and consequences of non-payment.
- Maintain transparent pricing and billing practices.
- Make sure financing eligibility and approval processes are fair and applied consistently.
- Protect patient data according to security best practices.
Measuring the Impact of Patient Financing Options on Your Practice's Revenue
To determine how effective a new patient financing program is, it's important to consistently track several key performance indicators (KPIs) over time. Here are some KPIs that you can use to measure the impact of patient financing options on your practice's revenue:
- Monthly financing application volume
- Application approval rates
- Patient procedure volume and cases accepted
- The average patient financing amount
- Revenue generated from patient financing
- Financing payment collection rates
Many financing platforms also offer reporting and analytics capabilities that blend with a practice's data to make KPI monitoring as simple as possible. Benchmarking these metrics establishes a solid baseline, allowing progress to be measured moving forward. Practices should analyze the KPI data regularly, looking for positive trends (i.e., increasing approval volumes and growing revenue influenced by the availability of financing options).
If certain metrics do not meet expectations, it may mean it is time to update marketing efforts, adjust financing plan offerings, improve the patient financing experience, or provide more staff training. Continuous improvement based on a review of the data is key to maximizing a patient financing program's long-term revenue impact.
Introducing BillFlash FlexPay: Patient Financing Made Easy
BillFlash FlexPay is a new patient financing solution that simplifies the payment process for patients and medical providers. FlexPay ensures providers receive payment in full right away while offering patients the flexibility to pay their balance in manageable monthly installments. Every approved patient will receive a 3-month interest-free financing option.
With FlexPay's easy 30-second online application, there are no hard credit checks to apply*. FlexPay has a 90% approval rate, so almost all patients qualify for financing options. For providers, FlexPay offers payment initiated the next business day, so you get paid quickly. It also attracts more patients, improves retention, and minimizes awkward payment conversations.
If you have a patient who just found out they need a necessary medical procedure that will cost $3,500 out of pocket after insurance, this unexpected medical bill may be beyond what they can afford upfront. In the past, the patient would have had to make difficult choices: either back out of the procedure, rack up credit card debt, or take out a high-interest loan with strict payment terms.
But with BillFlash FlexPay, there's a better option. While in your office, the patient completes a simple online application. They are reviewed instantly, and if approved, can choose the monthly payment plan that fits their budget. When they leave your office, they feel relieved knowing the bill is manageable. You get paid right away, so you don't have to worry about collecting payment.
Unlock New Revenue Growth With Patient Financing From BillFlash
In a time where patient responsibility amounts continue to grow, offering flexible financing solutions is becoming increasingly important for medical practices. From increasing case volumes and revenues to improving patient satisfaction and retention, the benefits of providing patient financing options are plentiful and cannot be ignored. Solutions like BillFlash FlexPay streamline the financing process for practices and patients.
With quick approvals, low interest rate options, and provider payment right away, FlexPay empowers practices to boost their bottom line by providing more payment options for their patients. Ready to elevate your practice's revenue by offering flexible patient financing? Schedule a demo with BillFlash now and discover how FlexPay can help you grow your practice. Click here to book your demo today!
*Account openings and payment activities are reported to a major credit bureau. Loans are made by Transportation Alliance Bank, Inc., dba TAB Bank, which determines qualifications for and terms of credit.