Consumers across demographic groups are feeling the sting of high out-of-pocket medical costs, often delaying or foregoing necessary treatment because they can’t afford it.
With the pandemic possibly on the wane in 2022, consumers who’ve put off medical treatment are flooding back to their physicians, but the affordability issue isn’t going away. Specialized lending products are filling the gap between what insurance pays and increasingly large out-of-pocket copays, deductibles and uncovered treatment balances.
That’s proving a benefit both patients and their healthcare providers.
Underscoring the trend, on Wednesday (Feb. 9), healthcare financing FinTech CareCredit announced a multiyear pact with Illinois-based health system Mercyhealth, with seven hospitals and 85 primary and specialty care locations, under which Mercyhealth will accept the Synchrony-backed CareCredit health credit card throughout its network.
Kimberly Scaccia, vice president of revenue cycle at Mercyhealth, said the goal is to provide offerings that “improve the lives of our patients and their families, which includes providing options to finance their medical journeys. This partnership allows us to offer patients flexible payment options across all points of care and service lines so they can get the care they want or need.”
“It all comes down to the enormous body of research that PYMNTS has done, that we’ve done, that we read in the [news] about this massively increasing out-of-pocket cost experience,” Shannon Burke, senior vice president and general manager of health systems at CareCredit, told PYMNTS.
Burke said Mercy wants to “offer a full journey, an integrated, complete solution from the point when a prospective patient is thinking about care and researching care potentially, all the way through their care. They’re trying everything they can to engage that patient clinically and financially so that they know their options [and] there’s no surprises.”
That could be said of every regional health system in America in 2022, as two years of reduced cash flow and costs associated with the COVID battle find providers seeking revenue streams.
The study “Wellness And Affordability: How Payments Practices Create Positive Patient Experiences,” a PYMNTS report with research sponsored by CareCredit, found that consumers paid roughly $810 on out-of-pocket healthcare visits on average, with uninsured patients spending 19% more out of pocket than their insured counterparts. Additionally, 21% of patients reported spending more on healthcare than in previous years.
Get the study: Wellness And Affordability: How Payments Practices Create Positive Patient Experiences
Options Expand for People, Patients and Pets
As the healthcare industry at large becomes aware of a relatively new entity we call the “patient/consumer,” care providers are being increasingly judged against digital experiences in other aspects of consumer life — and healthcare has some catching up to do.
“My digital and consumer experience at a hospital or in healthcare [is compared] to my best experience any place else in my consumer life,” Burke said. “It [requires] health systems to think very differently about financing, about options and about that experience because we now, as patients being consumers, will walk with our feet.”
With the patient/consumer now expecting — and even demanding — accurate pretreatment estimates and other flexibility around care delivery, health-specific credit lines are well-timed.
Burke said the CareCredit card “is definitely specific to health and wellness, and that’s health and wellness for yourself, your family, and within the family, we include furry four-legged legged friends, so our pets.”
The CareCredit card is integrated with Mercyhealth’s Epic MyChart patient portal, which Burke called “another example of how Synchrony is delivering on its strategy of expanding and accelerating innovative product offerings through different distribution channels at scale — in this case, enabling Synchrony and Mercyhealth to offer flexible financing options to all of its patients through one platform.”
“We have over 12 million cardholders,” she added, “so it’s a high likelihood, north of a 15% chance, that I have a CareCredit card in my pocket already when I come into [a] Mercy [location].”
See also: 21% of US Consumers Paying More Out-of-Pocket Healthcare Costs This Year
Both Sides Benefit
As the patient/consumer mindset takes hold more widely, people will use specialized healthcare credit lines and related digital products in ways that best suit individual needs.
Pointing to the random nature of most injury and illness, Burke said a healthcare credit line serves as “a very good way to manage that medical expense, because in many cases, they’re not predictable.”
“We don’t know when we might fall and hurt ourselves and have to get an X-ray, or find ourselves sick somewhere, or our pet eats chocolate and needs to visit the vet. This way, a) it gives them the protection to be able to pay for their out-of-pocket expenses, but b) allows them to manage their healthcare expenses in a specific bucket,” Burke added.
Providers and systems benefit in different ways, but it’s still about managing spend and cost.
“We’re not only integrated for the patient,” Burke said, “we’re integrated for the provider, for the health systems. That experience, from the office staff to the overall financial experience on the health system side, is also important to note.
“From the provider lens and the experience that those highly burdened, highly strained health system staffs feels, it’s important to note that [financing] is also integrated in the backend. It is designed to help the health systems have a good accounts receivable process, increase their revenue, improve their cash flow and reduce their debt risk,” Burke said.
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