We signed up 40 new clients within a month by using this unique pricing structure
3 smart tweaks we made according to pricing psychology that increased our revenue
Pricing is the most powerful lever when it comes to business. It evokes strong emotional responses from people. The standard “good, better, best” approach to pricing is okay but strictly belongs to the garden variety of pricing plans.
We’d just read a blog on how HubSpot’s pricing page revamp had resulted in increased marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by 165% and signups by 89%. And also found that most visitors landed on the homepage and quickly moved to our pricing page.
According to https://www.blackbookmarketresearch.com’s recent survey, Hospitals Turn to Bolt-On, Outsourced Revenue Cycle Management, the search for a good medical billing/RCM company has increased. Staff, technology, Cost, experience are the major factors hospital decision makers consider before outsourcing either their full RCM or a component of their revenue cycle.
Especially cost is a crucial factor that plays a key role during decision making. Most of the medical billing companies operate on two models. One is End-End RCM support and the second one is FTE. In this new healthcare era, if you want to scale your billing business you have to be unique in terms of not only providing your specialized services but even the fee you charge has to be unique. I would say, you must listen to their story before revealing your pricing information.
BillingParadise works in an industry where customers are used to making informed decisions. We work with hospitals, large medical groups, independent practices, and clinics. Game-changing decisions are made every day, such as joining accountable care organizations to stabilize their practices, expanding their presence to serve varied patient populations and externalizing their revenue cycle organizations. In a volatile climate, every day involves making smart choices, big and small.
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The search for the perfect spaghetti sauce
At BillingParadise we receive close to 100 client requests a month. But we knew we could do better. And the solution we hit upon was reminiscent of Malcolm Gladwell’s search for the right spaghetti sauce. Our percentage based pricing model was working just fine.
But most clients had different needs. And we knew it was time to give our pricing table a makeover. The expectations healthcare organizations have of a billing company has undergone a massive shift. It can be tied to the major challenges medical care providers face today.
Here is what C-suite executives in the healthcare sector are looking for:
- Offer RCM technology and services that focus on enabling workflows for in-house staff
- Letting go of a senior biller is a huge setback for an organization as practice-specific experience also walks out of the door. Healthcare executives want RCM vendors to work as an extension of their existing teams.
- According to a survey by Definitive Healthcare 38% of a hospital, executives said they’d partner with an RCM provider who offers co-management support.
- The same survey also states that only about 5% of hospitals wanted to completely outsource their revenue cycle operations
- An increasing number of healthcare organizations say that healthcare cost savings are their top priority
- Most healthcare organizations are looking to work with revenue cycle companies who can fuse revenue cycle management operations with value-based care objectives.
- Their major challenge is finding an RCM provider who can work with their existing EHR and teams
- There is a huge demand for visibility across the revenue cycle continuum
- A survey by Dimensional Insight cites performance tracking as a huge concern for senior-level decision makers
- Overall healthcare organizations are in need of revenue cycle partners who’ll offer flexible service packages, are tech-enabled and who can blend in seamlessly with their current workflows.
The Groundwork…
Like all good pricing models, it had to offer various price points. The biggest advantage of offering different price points is that clients would price shop within our site and not click away. But when you work in a hyper-competitive industry such as healthcare, you compete with not just other Revenue Cycle Management companies. In fact, your biggest competitor is your previous years’ service offerings and price points.
Now, we definitely knew the basic criteria our pricing architecture had to meet.
- The price points had to be well defined and differentiated to avoid confusion
- It had to map closely to buyer personas and the benefits they’d get from choosing a certain package
- The price variance should be based on value metrics
We understand that you’re imagining our pricing table would look like this
We love cute images. And we’d love it even more if our pricing strategy could be so simple as well!. Most products and services focus on the sweet spot that is nestled comfortably between the lowest price range and the highest price. The low price will drive clients to the door and 9 out of 10 times they’d graduate to a higher plan. Instead of offering bare boned services and hoping our customers would graduate to a higher price range not out of choice but out of necessity, we created a pricing architecture that was attuned to their specific, very specific, needs.
1. Put your client in the driving seat (or how we grew our revenue by 6.3% within 2 months)
Lots of medical billing companies are offering end-end revenue cycle management services these days. If you are using in-house billers and coders and haven’t approached one, it’s basically just the process of submitting claims to insurance companies where in the company takes full in charge in your revenue cycle starting from Eligibility verification till AR bucket. Hence, they charge you from your total collections. There are companies charging 8-12% but you could find medical billing companies for 3-6%. If you are one among the users of top EHR/EMR software then you will be paying somewhere between the same 3-6% to your EHR Vendor’s RCM service.
But the only problem we heard from our clients is, there are too many limitations say, they don’t do the end-end service, there will be a minimum fee if you are practicing services like Ophthalmology, physical therapy, mental health then you might look for a third party RCM vendor.
What we did with the “Co-Managed Revenue cycle management” wasn’t revolutionary when an OBGYN provider didn’t want to fire her 20+ years experienced biller who was managing the entire billing. We have few customers who fired their billers and coders, the moment we signed the contract. We’ve negotiated rates, customized services, offered onsite-resources, and a few other things. But in this OBGYN Practice case, the client wasn’t ready to fire her biller not just for her loyalty but the knowledge too. Hence, we implemented a new plan not because of the client, but we had faced similar stories in the past. Let’s talk about what exactly Co-managed Revenue cycle management service is and the benefits of implementing it.
In a simple formula:
Co-Managed Revenue cycle Management Service = your team + BillingParadise Team
Most healthcare organizations do not want to replace their senior medical billing and coding staff. Because organization-specific information and years of experience also leave out of the door. We understand how dicey it can be. And that’s why BillingParadise offers co-managed revenue cycle support. Revenue cycle veterans of the client’s billing team join hands with our experts to improve efficiency across the revenue cycle continuum.
“I was struggling to understand all the different software you’ll have to learn and unlearn to bill nowadays. Luckily, the guys at BillingParadise came alone and do most of the legwork. I check the draft version of claims and transmit them. It’s increased our productivity a lot” , was what Helen Cassano said, the billing director of an ob-gyn practice in California.
It is best practice for medical billing companies to offer co-managed revenue cycle services as it reduces startup times and gives healthcare organizations more control over their workflows.
2. “I don’t promise to stand out. I promise to blend in” (the biggest psychology hack ever)
Our next pricing package was designed to address our client base’s chief concern – externalizing revenue cycle operations. In the words of legendary advertising and marketing expert Ogilvy Mather, “Selling is having an answer to every objection”.
Though most healthcare organizations are planning to outsource their revenue cycle operations by 2020 according to a BlackBook survey, very few them actually take the quantum leap.
Wonder why?
Because working with a medical biller who is down the hall is a lot more convenient to work with medical billers who don’t share the same office space. According to a new study by Stanford psychology scientists, the feeling of working as a team fueled intrinsic motivation by participants and made them more productive. Across 5 experiments the scientists found that people love to work and function as a team. And the shocker? Participants performed well thinking that they were a part of the team thought they were working alone!
On the one hand, healthcare organizations wanted to outsource their RCM operations as it grew increasingly complex and heavily regulated. But on the other hand, wanted someone to become a part of their team and grow with their organizations instead of being a faceless voice. There had to be a solution that helped our clients find the right resources, make them a part of their medical practice’s fabric and yet not deal with expensive salaries and the drab hiring process. BillingParadise offered our prospects just that. The FTE model has been around for some time now. But most organizations don’t know how to ‘work it’.
Top concerns when hiring FTEs:
- What if you get a butternut squash instead of a lemonade? If the FTE hired is not the right fit?
- What if they are experts in the domain and bring to the table years of experience and best practices but stick out like a sore thumb in the in-house team?
- What if they cannot adapt to existing workflows and technology?
Our proposal:
BillingParadise’s experts would drive down to the healthcare organization and conduct a thorough study of its people, processes and technology. Sit with the top-level management and develop a go-forward plan. Offer the organization several FTEs who’d meet their expectations Provide quick replacement if need be. Once the modalities were out of the way we added another column to our pricing table. “Hire FTEs for as low as $$$”.
And it worked .
The first client to contact us filled out the enquiry form within 10 days of introducing our new pricing offer. It was a podiatry group based in Mount Dora. They wanted to expand their office and also offer more specialties. The medical group hired 3 orthopedicians and started to offer ortho care as well.
There was a blip in the bubble. Their in-house team were well-versed with podiatry billing and coding. But drew a blank when it came to orthopedic billing. The group practice did not want to outsource its ortho billing alone as that’d lead to disjointed workflows and payment turnaround times. When BillingParadise offered FTE services the medical group was happy to hire 2 of our ortho coders to speed up their coding cycle.
With our FTE package we were able to help the podiatry and ortho group:
- Circumvent the tedious hiring process
- Cut overheads as we offer affordable support
- Continue without much disruption to their workflow
3. Bundled package. The big Christmas present.
People love bundled offerings. Whether it is game consoles or revenue cycle management services.
“80% of Hospitals Vetting Full Revenue Cycle Management Outsourcing”, screams this headline from RevCycleIntelligence.
According to a survey by BlackBook, 80% of hospital leaders were planning to outsource their entire revenue cycle functions in 2019. The demand for full revenue cycle management outsourcing has increased by 86% between 2015 and 2019.
Sounds good?
But shockingly, only 18% of hospitals implemented a full-fledged revenue cycle management project in 2018. Because a bundled revenue cycle management package shouldn’t just cover the various processes and moving parts of the revenue cycle. It has to go beyond. It has to free physicians from the monotony of documentation. It has to free CFOs from receiving opaque reports that require enormous amounts of time and focus to unbox. It has to free organizations from the looming threats of non-compliance. Free healthcare professionals from the fear of being made the poster child for “look what happens when you under code or overbill”.
In addition to our existing services, we added a few more solutions that could help our clients find the easy button when it came to improving revenue and compliance.
The full-cycle revenue management services of BillingParadise now includes:
- A denial review process
- A complete lost revenue recovery audit to identify revenue leaks and opportunities
- Credentialing and contracting review
- Legacy AR support
- On-site deployment of resources
- MACRA ongoing support
- Workflow and revenue cycle management tools
- Structured go-live process
And that is not all. We are constantly evolving our services and offerings to meet the evolving demands of our clients. The full-cycle services package is by far our most popular and signed up for pricing package.
Here is how to meet and exceed growth goals with an attractive pricing table
- Avoid option overload. Don’t stupefy clients with too many choices. Having to make too many decisions will lead to no decision being made at all.
- Ensure that your pricing packages are not just different price points. They have to be tied to distinct value metrics
- Keep an ear to the ground. Right from services to pricing those services let it all be centred on your target demographic
- Remove cognitive strain by offering transparent and consistent prices
- Identify objections and concerns.
The post 3 proven medical billing pricing models every billing company’s CEO must keep an eye on appeared first on BillingParadise.
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