Practice Management Alert

Question: I think sending bills to patients via their preferred communication type makes sense, but I’m wary of texting patients their bill. It seems aggressive, like it immediately interrupts whatever they’re doing, when they may have been just as receptive to an email alert that a new bill was ready. Am I overanalyzing things?

Washington Subscriber

Answer: Patient satisfaction is a key part of revenue cycle management (RCM), and when patients judge payment requests to be aggressive, they may develop begrudging feelings about payment. Also, many people receive suspicious texts asking for money, so patients may be skeptical of the veracity of your organization’s text and even go out of their way to avoid paying that way because they’re wary.

While texting billing notices can be great for an organization in terms of quicker payments and possibly even less expensive costs — sending a secure text with a link may be cheaper than paper, envelope, and stamp — it can be risky in terms of compliance. You need to make sure whatever system or vendor your organization is using complies with the security and privacy tenets of HIPAA.

A courteous middle-ground approach could be giving patients options about what kind of text alerts they want, including appointment reminders, and providing consent or being able to opt in for alerts about bills. If you’re going to proceed with messaging, make sure you schedule texts to go out during reasonable times of day, so you don’t have patients irate about being woken up in the middle of the night after receiving an automated text notifying them of a bill! Note that some states may have laws about this specifically.

Rachel Dorrell, MA, MS, CPC-A, CPPM, Production Editor, AAPC