Online payments more and more adopted by healthcare consumers

Healthcare consumers have started to increasingly make payments online, according to a research conducted by athenahealth.

The findings were published in “Trends in Patient Pay”, a report that uncovers important patterns in how patients nationwide are paying their bills, highlighting the importance of a frictionless patient payment experience for both practices and patients.

Although payments through a desktop interface remained the most common channel for online payment, mobile increased by 63% as a share of total patient payment dollars from 2018 to 2019 – demonstrating patients’ desire to pay medical bills via easier, more convenient methods when they are available. In fact, desktop payments declined across all age groups, especially those under age 40 (-14%, as opposed to -4% for those aged 40+), highlighting younger generations’ preference for mobile-enabled payments.

The percentage of online payments increased across nearly all specialties, the areas with the largest percentage was pediatric/adolescent medicine (30 %). Not surprisingly, the data also demonstrates that no matter the payment method, collecting patient obligations becomes harder as balances get higher. Still, for all specialties combined, the percentage of patient money owed that was paid within 6 months increased from 81.4% in 2017 to 82.6% in 2019.

The research, which was conducted to better understand the dynamics of patient obligations and payments, analysed more than 158 million claims across 33 million patients who visited an athenahealth client in selected specialties over a 2.5-year period from July 2017 – Dec 2019. Specialties of focus were Primary Care, Pediatrics/Adolescent Medicine, Gastroenterology, OB/GYN, Orthopedics, Orthopedic Surgery, General Surgery, Cardiology, and Urgent Care.