We explore this in The Digital Platform Promise: How Patients Want to Streamline Healthcare Payments, a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration based on a survey of over 2,500 U.S. consumers and measuring their desire for more seamless online healthcare payments.
While portals, apps, and provider websites do their best, it’s all started to feel a bit “legacy” three years into the pandemic digital shift, when we have unified platforms to get this job done. What are these payment pain points in the consumer-patient experiences? The study tells us.
Specifically, over half of the consumers surveyed “faced difficulties when making healthcare payments, with 54% experiencing at least one pain point in the past 12 months. Twenty-one percent found the payment process difficult, 18% found medical bills confusing and 8.8% and 6.2% raised concerns about the security of their information and lack of preferred payment methods, respectively.”
Moreover, the study states that “paying for healthcare products and services is often a friction-filled task for consumers,” as 54% of consumers surveyed said they “experienced at least one pain point during the payment process in the past 12 months.”
Digging into those stats, 21% of consumers found the actual process of paying difficult. In comparison, 18% said that medical bills were confusing “in ways that hampered efficient payment, with 13% unable to decipher the costs for specific services and 9% finding inconsistencies between the costs outlined on medical bill statements and those detailed within the online patient portal.”
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Given these findings, it’s unsurprising that consumer interest in a single, comprehensive digital platform appeals to 70% of consumers who say they like using a unified digital platform to manage their healthcare needs and activities (43% indicated high levels of interest).
Get the Study: The Digital Platform Promise: How Patients Want to Streamline Healthcare Payments
