By Nick McLaughlin
Last week The American Hospital Association released their 3-year strategic plan (2022-2024), which outlines five areas of focus that they will be aligned with. The areas include helping hospitals to:
- Provide Better Care and Greater Value
- Ensure the Financial Stability of Hospitals and Health Systems
- Enhance Public Trust and Confidence in Hospitals and Health Systems
- Address Workforce Challenges: Now, Near and Far
- Improve the Health Care Consumer Experience
At Breez Health, we could not be more excited or supportive of these strategic areas of focus for AHA. This is the future of healthcare – creating a fair cost of care that enables hospitals to thrive, serve their patients and communities, and improve healthcare for everyone from patients to employees and everyone in between.
Breez was created to support just this, and is assisting hospitals with each of these items every day. We could not be more excited to see that the industry as a whole is focused on solving the same challenges. Here’s how Breez is aligned with the AHA strategic initiatives.
- Better Care. Greater Value.
We are helping hospitals get charity-eligible patients enrolled in their financial assistance programs — a proven way to reduce care avoidance due to cost concerns. When low-income patients are granted financial assistance on their hospital bills, “researchers saw an immediate and sharp increase in visits to the doctor among program enrollees.”
- Support Financial Stability of Hospitals and Health Systems.
Hospital financial assistance programs are largely cost centers full of non-revenue generating labor hours; not to mention inefficient, paper-based processes. Partnering with Breez reduces the cost of sending paper applications, following up on incomplete applications, and processing nonqualifying applications.
- Enhance Public Trust and Confidence.
The Medical Debt Crisis in our country remains a hot-button issue, but hospitals have a major opportunity to flip that narrative. Most patients who can afford to pay their hospital bills pay. Hospitals do a great job of offering payment plans and patient financing to patients who need those options. But the majority of patients who cannot afford to pay their hospital bills, most of them charity-eligible under their hospital’s financial assistance program, go to collections and not their hospital’s FAP. Breez Health works with hospitals to implement patient-friendly FAP processes that reduce internal costs and help get charity-eligible patients out of collections and onto the hospital’s FAP. We link arms with hospitals to empower them to reduce the financial burden of care on the patients who need help the most!
- Address Workforce Challenges.
Hospitals are struggling to stay appropriately staffed at this time. Our Automated FAP App Processing service takes the manual labor out of reviewing and processing paper applications, allowing hospitals to reduce workforce or repurpose staff to revenue generating activities.
- Improve the Healthcare Consumer Experience.
“I can complete my financial assistance application online, right?” Unfortunately, the answer at most hospitals today is, “No.” Breez Health’s Online Financial Assistance Platform software gives patients a super easy-to-use online option to see if they qualify for financial assistance and apply online. Making the complete healthcare experience positive and simple for them.
We know there’s a lot to do, and many uphill battles to be faced by hospitals – but we are optimistic about the future and excited to partner with hospitals to help make this future state of healthcare a reality.
