Future of Patient Billing

How to simplify private patient billing in NHS hospitals – and why SaaS is the future

Imagine running a restaurant and, on a regular basis, you give some of your diners a 50% discount. Not because of any problems with the food, or because you’re running a promotion – but simply because your front-of-house staff keep making mistakes with the bills.

Dona Mitkov
Senior Product Owner, Damilah Billing 

If you kept doing this, you’d soon run into financial difficulties and your business would go bust. That means you’d have to be crazy to allow it to keep happening, right? 

But that’s exactly the situation we’re seeing when it comes to private-healthcare billing in NHS hospitals. Invoicing errors and inconsistencies abound, resulting in bills often going out with up to 50% – sometimes even 60% – of their value missing. No wonder so few NHS private clinics are managing to turn a profit. 

One of the primary causes of this problem is outdated, complex and inefficient processes based on the use of multiple spreadsheets.  

For example, certain types of critical information – such as insurance terms or costs of procedures – may be stored on one spreadsheet; while other information – such as data relating to patients – may be stored elsewhere. Added to that, there may be multiple versions of these spreadsheets that are emailed from one team member to another, updated and then forwarded again, before a bill can be generated. 

It’s easy to see how such byzantine processes can lead to huge amounts of time being wasted, delays in sending out invoices, errors and inconsistencies, and most damaging of all, poor levels of payment recovery. 

A simpler way to bill

The good news is that there’s a much simpler and more effective way of managing your billing processes that will free up time among employees and help to ensure that every invoice that leaves your department is on time and accurate. That involves adopting a digital billing solution that is designed specifically for the UK private healthcare sector – such as Damilah Billing.

First and foremost, it allows you to securely store in one place all the relevant data that’s required to generate a bill – giving you a single source of accurate, real-time information. That alone leads to huge time savings and error reduction.

But there are even more benefits, including:

• A high degree of flexibility, allowing you to record and track all your patients, whether they’re inpatients, outpatients, insured, self-paid, and so on.
• A simple, user-friendly interface that is intuitive to use, meaning training can be kept to a minimum and errors decreased even further.
• The ability to manage user roles with ease, so each person in the process only gets to see the data they need to see (which of course is critical when it comes to the kinds of sensitive information stored on healthcare systems), at the right point in the process when they need to see it.
• The option to automate billing processes, making things even simpler, saving you more time and reducing the payment cycle.
• A big reduction in paperwork and paper usage, as all your invoices and related documents can be accessed electronically.
• The ease with which reports and dashboards can be accessed, allowing you to have real-time data at your fingertips to make better-informed decisions.

What’s more, installing the system and getting started is incredibly simple. 

Because Damilah Billing is a cloud-native solution, and specifically designed for UK private healthcare operators, it’s quick and easy to integrate with your existing EHR or ERP systems. Usually, a few days should be plenty.

Why SaaS is the future of billing

Additionally, the user interface is deliberately designed to resemble a spreadsheet and is intuitive to operate – so your employees who may be reluctant to switch to a new system will find it easy to adapt with minimal training.

We strongly believe that software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions such as Damilah Billing are the future of healthcare billing, and will form an effective part of any NHS hospitals’ digital transformation programme.

Cloud-hosted systems allow you to get up and running in the shortest amount of time, with minimal disruption to your on-going processes.

They also enable you to benefit from regular updates, without the upheaval of having to install new software on every device, or having to wait until your team have some downtime.

And of course, the system can be securely accessed at any time, using any device, from any location – including restaurants, even the ones that keep under-billing their customers and probably won’t be around for much longer.