A High-Value, Low-Risk Solution for Revenue Generation
Concierge medicine is not a new concept, but the service is gaining new traction. According to the Journal of General Internal Medicine, only 152 estimated concierge physicians could be found in the US in 2005. By 2019, that number rose to an estimated 5,000-20,000 physicians nationwide.
While the field of concierge medicine is still young, it is rapidly growing — especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hospitals and health systems are looking for additional revenue streams to help recover losses from cancelled or postponed elective procedures. Providers are burned out, and hospitals are at risk of losing talent. Patients are willing to pay for increased access to their physicians and other clinical care services.
Savvy hospital systems and providers alike are implementing concierge services as an alternative revenue source at a time when elective surgeries and other revenue-generating procedures have been postponed or cancelled due to COVID.
Healthfully offers a platform for health systems to use to take advantage of this lucrative business opportunity. Healthfully provides the solutions that health systems need to manage concierge services through our configurable platform and transformational service offerings.
Keep Reading to Learn More About our Concierge Integration Capabilities, as well as:
- How health systems, providers, and patients benefit from concierge services
- Why concierge services are here to stay – even after COVID
- How to partner with Healthfully to bring concierge services to your health system
Concierge Services: How It Works
Concierge services seek to offer an enhanced, personalized approach to providing health services to each patient. It focuses on providing increased patient access to a physician, both in terms of availability and duration spent with the patient. These extra services often include same-day-access to your provider, immediate cell phone and text messaging, unlimited office visits, online consultations, convenient prescription refills and scheduling, as well as others.
Providers of concierge services typically charge the patient an ongoing monthly or annual fee for increased access, allowing the physician to take a much smaller case load. Standard clinical services continue to be billed through Medicare or the patient’s insurance plan.
Concierge services can be attractive to patients and physicians, as well as clinical practices and health systems. Many patients are willing to pay for exclusive memberships and increased service. Providers benefit from a more manageable caseload. Health systems and clinical practices have the potential to become more profitable with the added revenue stream.
How Health Systems Benefit from Concierge Services
Increase Revenue
The demand for concierge services is increasing substantially, and many healthcare systems are now relying on these services as a consistent revenue stream. Concierge services are not a billable service through insurance, which allows hospitals and providers to retain payments in full.
Additionally, when patients can communicate directly with their providers and with the provider’s staff, there is decreased stress on billing and administrative departments at the system level. With less overhead in these departments, health systems can save additional dollars.
Enhance Patient Care
When physicians elect to provide concierge services, they are making a commitment to take on fewer patients. With fewer patients, doctors can spend more time with each of them to build a strong patient/provider relationship and offer more personalized care.
Most doctor visits occur once a year and take about 10 minutes. Many patients find these visits are too short and impersonal to give them the value they seek. When patients go to physicians that offer concierge services, they can guarantee they will receive quality interactions with their physician when needed, leading to higher patient engagement and patient satisfaction, which can lead to improvement in patient outcomes.
Reduce Provider Burnout
According to the American Journal of Medicine, “a concierge physician sees 6 to 8 patients per day compared with 20 to 24 patients for the typical primary care physician.” With fewer patients to manage, physicians experience less stress. This, in turn, improves provider satisfaction, which may lead to less physician turnover and burnout for hospital systems to manage.
Beyond Covid: Concierge Medicine is Here to Stay
Since the emergence of COVID-19, many hospital systems and medical care professionals have relied on concierge services to increase revenue while providing more efficient and cost-effective patient care. The key challenge is finding a platform that can enable the patient promise of increased access to healthcare services while at the same time, delivering on the business promise of increased revenues and profitability.
The benefits of concierge services are substantial for health systems and hospitals of all sizes — and you can expect this type of personalized medicine to continue to gain popularity.
For healthcare systems, establishing concierge services instantly adds a new and valuable revenue stream that is highly attractive at the provider and system level. Concierge medicine is a high-value, low-risk option that is easy to implement and utilize right away, this service will continue to have a place in medicine long after COVID has passed.
Integrate Concierge Services Now with Healthfully
One of the key challenges of concierge services is offering the increased services for a competitive price that patients are willing to pay. For the economics of this model to work, a physician’s time needs to take advantage of a highly-leveraged digital patient engagement platform. Patients can experience a 365-day relationship and engage in services without always needing a face-to-face encounter with the physician.
Concierge services add significant value for physicians, patients, practices, and healthcare systems. Now is the perfect time to leverage concierge services as a steady form of revenue and expand your reach to patients that desire more frequent and personalized care.
Healthfully provides the technology solutions and the platform health systems needed to effectively administer and bill concierge services. Whether you need a base platform to start concierge services from scratch, or an embedded solution that integrates with your current EMR, we have the tools and technology to make it happen.
The Healthfully Concierge Platform includes the following key product features:
- Registration and intake
- Membership account management and membership fee collection
- Integrated physician availability and scheduling
- Integrated calendar
- Co-payments and merchant account
- Pre-visit forms and surveys
- Wellness remote device integration
- Certified patient portal and patient healthboard
- Secure Messaging and Tele-video visits
- Direct-call to provide mobile (without revealing phone number)
- Health programs, workflow, patient to-dos, alerts, notifications
- Patient circle-of-care access
- Moderated health communities
- Practice work space and dashboard
With concierge services through the Healthfully platform, health systems can:
- Increase profit through a reliable, lucrative revenue stream
- Integrate a service that is highly in-demand for health systems, providers, and patients
- Increase both patient and provider satisfaction
- Reduce repeat visits that lead to lost revenue
- Expand your service offerings through additional Healthfully platform add-ons
Think-Big, Start-Small, Scale-Fast with Healthfully
Visit our Platform Overview Page to learn more about our integration capabilities, or reach out to our team directly to learn more about concierge services and how our team can make these services an integral part of your health system offerings and revenue generation.
We also invite you to schedule a demo to become better acquainted with our platform and to learn how our team can help.