Medical professional liability (MPL) insurers play a critical role in the healthcare industry as an important safeguard for healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations. However, the industry faces unprecedented challenges due to increased frequency and severity of claims and high jury awards to plaintiffs, significantly increasing their financial liabilities.
Rising costs of settling claims, legal fees, and court costs further strain these insurers, which has resulted in higher insurance premiums for healthcare professionals and organizations. Should these challenges continue in the future, there’s the potential for even higher premiums that could negatively affect healthcare professionals and their facilities.
At the same time, doctors and hospitals, the primary clients of these insurers, are dealing with increasing administrative burdens, which escalate operational costs. These combined pressures are creating a more challenging and costly environment in the MPL landscape.
Leverage High-Impact, Low-Effect Strategies
To succeed in this environment, MPL carriers need to retain profitable customers and reduce operational expenses without disrupting short-staffed operations or burdening their hospital and physician clients. A high-impact, low-effort strategy is to digitize billing, premium collections, and outbound payments.
By doing so, MPL carriers can enhance the customer experience, streamline administrative processes, and improve efficiency. This approach enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty, helps maintain profitability, and fosters stronger relationships with healthcare clients amidst rising premiums.
Enable Operational and Customer Efficiency
Paying policy premiums is the most frequent interaction healthcare providers have with their MPL carriers. Ensuring timely payments and avoiding lapses in coverage is mission critical for doctors and hospitals. A simple and efficient payment solution not only helps clients reduce their administrative workload but also guarantees timely payments, enhancing customer retention and loyalty.
This approach is especially important in an environment of rising premiums and increasing operational pressures on healthcare providers. Simplifying the most common interaction between providers and carriers can significantly strengthen relationships, ensuring continuous coverage, and fostering long-term loyalty.
Modernizing Outbound Payments
Disbursing claims and fee payments is a crucial task for MPL carriers. Using paper checks for these disbursements can be costly, time-consuming, and susceptible to fraud. By digitizing the outbound payments process, MPL carriers can significantly enhance their efficiency and reduce administrative burdens.
Digital payments streamline the disbursement process, reduce the risk of fraud, and lower operational costs. This modernization not only frees up valuable time for staff but also improves accuracy and security in these financial transactions.
Streamlining Technology Integrations
Completely overhauling legacy systems is daunting and often requires substantial investments of time, effort, and money—one study showed that large enterprises spend an average of $27.5 million on complete digital transformation projects. However, McKinsey found that up to 70% of large-scale digital transformation projects fail to achieve their intended outcomes, primarily due to their complexity and resource demands.
Fortunately, carriers can modernize their payments experience easily and without disruption to their internal operations. True SaaS digital solutions designed to streamline inbound and outbound payments enable MPL insurance companies to optimize these essential touchpoints without interrupting business. This solution is easy to integrate and simple to implement, offering modern customer experience and streamlined disbursement options without the need to replace core systems or invest in an expensive legacy system overhaul.
Transforming Operations Through Digital Payment Solutions
Easy-to-use technology streamlines workflows by reducing the time required for administrative tasks and data entry. This allows healthcare professionals to dedicate more time to patient care, thereby improving the quality of care and enabling them to see more patients. Given the limited time that doctors and healthcare professionals have, it’s imperative to offer simple and efficient options for paying essential insurance premiums.
Insurance carriers can enhance their customers' experience without expensive and time-consuming replacement or upgrade of core legacy systems. Digital payment solutions offer a strategic alternative by allowing insurers to easily modernize their customer-facing touchpoints rather than replace backend systems.
This targeted approach reduces risk and accelerates the deployment of new functionalities, enabling smoother transitions and continuous operations. Additionally, choosing a true SaaS solution allows all carriers to receive regular, automatic updates, ensuring these organizations are consistently benefiting from the latest features and improvements.
Billing and payments are crucial touchpoints for every policyholder, significantly impacting customer satisfaction. Implementing SaaS payment solutions can be done seamlessly without system interruptions or downtime. Streamlining payment processes not only improves efficiency but also reduces call volumes and administrative workloads, allowing staff to focus on more value-added activities.
One MPL insurer identified payments as a technology solution that could easily bring significant improvements. In just one year, they increased online payment adoption by 211% and saw a 7X boost to AutoPay enrollment
Disrupting Without Disruption
By implementing a true SaaS digital payment solution, MPL insurers can significantly enhance their customer's experience while reducing time and cost. A simple way for doctors and hospitals to pay premiums improves their experience at the most frequent interaction with their carriers. Digitizing claims payments reduces time and cost, speeding up claim settlements.
This simple-to-implement approach saves time and money and alleviates the pressure on more expensive, disruptive, and time-consuming core system projects. A true SaaS payments solution can improve the user experience, lower expenses, and save doctors and healthcare providers valuable time they could otherwise spend on patient care.