Aligning single billing office technology with exemplary patient billing outcomes at Stanford Health Care

Abstract

Stanford Health Care’s (SHC’s) journey to the Epic single billing office (SBO) was an effort to effectively resolve patient enquiries and confusion about multiple billing statements and customer service interactions for hospital and professional fees. The implementation of the SBO at SHC combined the balances of self-pay portions onto one patient statement and unified the customer service experience. Aligning patient balances onto a single statement streamlined workflows, increased staff knowledge in both hospital and professional billing, reduced the cost of producing statements and eliminated the need to manage costly separate customer service departments. The SHC SBO combined all self-pay billing functions for the hospital and faculty physicians, reduced duplication of administrative duties, cut down on supplies and resources and eradicated miscommunications between separate billing departments. The project concurrently resulted in the creation of a centralised customer service department, The Self-Pay Management Office (SMO), in which ‘One Call Does It All’. SHC assembled a multidisciplinary steering committee to set the scope of the SBO project and to provide guidelines for governance and change management. The overall project scope was to create a single patient billing statement for all services at SHC, centralise the customer service and self-pay resolution under a single management structure and provide a single point of contact for patient calls, financial assistance enquiries and payment plan set-up. The SBO launch at SHC resulted in a 65 per cent reduction in billing-related patient complaints and disputes. Patient statement mailing costs were cut by 20 per cent, and the ‘One Call Does It All’ approach led to a 90 per cent first call resolution for billing-related enquiries. Decreased overall operational costs realised nearly US$2m in cost savings during the first year.