The most important part of any healthcare practice is helping patients. The second most important part is getting paid. Offering electronic patient statements is a great way to both make your patients happier and get paid faster, and—best of all—electronic patient statements are easy for your office to implement. 

An electronic statement contains the same information as the paper statement that is mailed to patients, but it can be sent via email or SMS/text. This avoids many of the common problems that occur with paper billing, including delivery costs, administrative and operational expenses, and the inherent delays that come from filing and completing a physical claims process. 

The Benefits of Electronic Patient Statements 

Electronic patient statements, like many examples of digital transformation, turn existing analog workflows into more efficient and cost-effective digital versions. This digital streamlining offers a wide array of benefits to both patients and practices. 

Here’s what you can expect when you start using electronic statements to speed up your billing times and improve your patients’ financial experience: 

Reduced Paper Clutter 

Eliminating paper isn’t just great for going green at the office—dealing with less physical paperwork helps your staff to operate more efficiently. Instead of filing physical billing statements or manually entering information from a form into a digital database, you and your team will be able to work directly with digital documents. This speeds up processes and ends tedious data-entry tasks. 

Faster Delivery 

Turnaround times are shortened significantly by an all-digital workflow. Instead of waiting several days for a document to travel through the mail, electronic patient statements arrive instantly. This reduces charge lag and makes same-day billing payments a real possibility. On average, electronic statements can be accessed at least five days earlier than mailed statements. 

Lower Costs 

Electronic patient statements save on paper, printing, and administrative costs. The average office worker uses 10,000 pieces of paper per year, and paper is the third highest expense (behind payroll and rent) for most businesses. The more you can rely on digital processes in place of paper, the more affordable your business becomes. 

Easy Online Access 

Electronic statements introduce portability and anytime accessibility to your patients’ payment processing. They can review bills and even make payments wherever and whenever it’s convenient, which results in shorter billing cycles for your business. This can also help with patient retention. 

Enhanced Security  

Believe it or not, physical documents are less secure than their digital counterparts. Sending statements electronically reduces the chance of mail fraud and identity theft. Digital documents can be encrypted and password protected, and unlike physical documents they don’t need to be destroyed in order to protect sensitive data. 

Adding Electronic Statements to Your Business 

Clearly, electronic statements are a great choice for any healthcare provider. They introduce a number of benefits for both you and your patients. And—most importantly—they result in not only quicker delivery than mailed statements, but quicker payments as well.  

Sending clear, easy-to-read, well-designed statements to patients not only increases the efficiency of receiving payments, but it also effectively captures self-pay revenue while improving the overall patient financial experience.  

Best of all, adding a system for electronic statements is easy as can be. There’s no complicated processes—all you need to give your patients and your office this time-saving and convenient solution is the right software. With the right system in place, you’ll be able to send out statements electronically through text or email, and your patients will be able to easily make payments online at their convenience. 

CollaborateMD offers just such a solution. There’s no complicated setup process either—just sign up for Collaborate MD and you’ll be able to implement a comprehensive electronic statement system, including a versatile and valuable patient portal for processing electronic patient statements. We even have the tools to automate the entire process to save even more time for you and your staff.  

Your patients will be grateful to receive bills electronically instead of in the mail, and to make payments online instead of over the phone or in person. Your staff will be thrilled by the reduced paperwork and streamlined workflows, and you’ll be excited to both send and receive payments faster than ever before. 

If you’re ready to take your patient billing to the next level, look no further. Learn more about how electronic statements can save your practice time and money by getting a free demo of CollaborateMD!