Modernizing Billing in Senior Living Communities
Residents and their families are demanding a higher level of care from senior living communities. Caregivers provide their residents with a long list of services, including helping with activities of daily living (ADLs), medication management, proper nutrition, and socializing, all while ensuring their residents’ experience is enriching and fulfilling.
Quality care takes adequate staffing, time, and money, and carefully tracking and managing the expenses and resources is essential to ensure payment for your services. Traditional billing processes like manual, paper-based systems can be time-consuming, error-prone, and costly. These outdated systems negatively affect employee performance and your bottom line. As retail and service industries embrace the digital age with online ordering and purchasing, the time is right for the senior living industry to do the same.
Modern senior care software solutions can reduce your staff’s administrative burden and give your residents greater control over their finances. Shifting towards digital billing software is a crucial step senior housing centers can take to improve the overall experience in their communities.
The Emergence of ePay and Similar Financial Tools
Keeping accurate, HIPAA-compliant records and adhering to senior living regulations, all while ensuring the center is profitable and operates smoothly, can be a daunting task for any facility.
The right senior living software simplifies the complex tasks of compliance and ensures efficient data management, billing, and patient and staff management — all of which ultimately safeguards your community's profitability.
Billing software can eliminate manual data entry and improve cash flow by streamlining your billing and payment process workflows. It can also give your residents and their families the secure, convenient payment experience they expect from businesses.
By leveraging ePay, you can achieve an efficient and organized approach to managing your community’s finances and care. ePay solutions offer payees 24/7, web-based self-service payment options while giving your staff the gift of time. Automated financial tools eliminate the tedious administrative tasks of keeping track of the services provided, typing and mailing invoices, and then recording and depositing paper checks each month.
The right digital payment management software can also integrate with the other financial tools your community uses, such as accounting software.
5 Benefits of Modern Billing for Senior Living Communities
Automating your operations can be beneficial, whether you want to modernize billing at an independent living community, a skilled nursing facility, or a memory care facility.
1: Billing and Payment Accuracy
Automated bill calculations reduce the risk of human error. ePay billing simplifies the billing process and automatically calculates charges based on your pricing and terms. Residents receive timely, accurate, and easy-to-pay online invoices with built-in validations, leaving no room for error.
2: Streamlined Operations
Streamline your entire operations with a simplified online billing and payment process. Process and email bills with payment links, offering residents an anytime/anywhere safe and secure ePay solution. Having no paper checks or manual reconciliation gives you instant access to payments for improved cash flow.
3: Improved Budgeting and Financial Planning
ePay systems record real-time payment transactions, ensuring that your financial information is immediately updated. There are no more delays in verifying payments or discrepancies between the billing and payment transactions. Accurate and up-to-date financial data is readily available, giving the budget office a comprehensive view of resources to make informed decisions quickly.
4: Integration with Existing Systems
Take advantage of a senior living billing solution that can integrate with your clinical technology solutions, including your electronic health record (EHR), electronic medication administration record (EMAR), and medical charting. By linking your clinical and billing solutions, you gain centralized access to all the information you need to send invoices, process payments, and improve your community’s cash flow.
5: Compliance and Security
Automation and seamless integration between your systems not only allows data sharing, but it also improves security and compliance with strict elder care regulations. With built-in compliance checks, senior living software simplifies regulatory compliance. Modernizing your senior billing ensures resident data stays safe and secure.
Common Challenges of Implementing a Modern Billing System
With so many staff shortages among senior living community care providers, implementing a new software system is daunting. While the director and operations team see the many benefits, convincing the rest of the employees may take more encouragement.
More than likely, the biggest pushback from the staff is their concern that the time it takes to learn the new technologies will come at the expense of their residents. The benefits are clear, so the faster you implement, the better off your community will be.
Resistance to Change
Although there may be downsides to your current processes, your team is comfortable and familiar with how they do things. So why should they change? Reinforce the positive impacts and benefits of the modernized billing system and listen to their concerns. Reassure them that the improvements will outweigh the time and stress of implementation.
Training
Staff may see training as another task to add to their already full day. Rely on your in-house HR team to help create short webinars or information sheets for targeted, just-in-time training. By offering information pertinent to each position, you can prevent information overload and speed up the training.
Data Conversion
Migrating data from your legacy system can be time-consuming and complex. Create a solid plan that maintains the integrity of your existing data.
Cost
Employees and residents are hyper-vigilant about community expenses. Clearly communicate the improved, secure online bill-paying process to the residents and the elimination of the administrative burden of billing for the staff.
How Eldermark Billing Can Help Your Senior Living Center
Eldermark NEXT senior living software provides all you need and more. Eldermark ePay simplifies the payment process and helps you get paid faster so you can do more in your community.
Schedule a demo with our team today to learn how you can improve cash flow, provide a better resident experience, and eliminate unnecessary time spent on paperwork and delays.
Contact us today to find out more about ePay and Eldermark NEXT — our end-to-end, modern, intuitive software platform designed specifically for today's senior living team.
