Consolidated Patient Billing Portal for Multi-Provider Invoice Tracking
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Solution Overview
Problem
Patients interacting with multiple unaffiliated healthcare providers face difficulties in tracking and paying invoices due to the need to access multiple portals, leading to inconvenience and potential late payments.
Innovation Solution
A multi-tenant system for consolidated user services (MTSCUS) that aggregates and consolidates invoices from multiple healthcare providers, creating personalized notification plans based on patient preferences and payment history, and facilitates electronic or paper payments through a centralized platform.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If patients access multiple separate provider portals to track and pay invoices, then each provider can maintain its own isolated billing system, but patients experience inconvenience and difficulty in tracking payments across multiple providers
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple isolated provider billing systems into a single consolidated patient portal that displays invoices from multiple healthcare providers in one unified interface. This allows patients to track and pay all their medical bills through a single system rather than accessing multiple separate provider portals, directly resolving the contradiction by improving ease of operation while managing system complexity through integration.
Solution Approach 2:
The consolidated patient portal is designed to handle multiple functions: displaying invoices from various providers, tracking payment status across different providers, processing payments to multiple providers, and sending notifications about due dates. This multi-functional system replaces the need for patients to interact with multiple specialized provider-specific portals, improving convenience while consolidating complexity into a single universal platform.
2Reliability
If patients manually track multiple invoices from different providers, then each provider maintains billing independence, but patients may not pay invoices in a timely manner
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements automated notification mechanisms that provide feedback to patients about their invoice status, due dates, and payment status. The portal sends alerts and reminders to patients when invoices are due or overdue, ensuring they are timely informed of their billing obligations. This feedback loop significantly improves payment timeliness by keeping patients actively informed without requiring them to manually check each provider's portal.
Solution Approach 2:
The consolidated portal performs preliminary actions by automatically collecting, organizing, and presenting all patient invoices from multiple providers in one centralized location before the patient needs to make payments. The system proactively manages the billing information gathering and presentation, saving patients time and ensuring they have all necessary information readily available to make timely payments.
3Loss of information
If healthcare providers send separate electronic notifications to patients, then each provider maintains its own notification system, but patients receive fragmented communication across multiple channels
Solution Approach 1:
The system merges notification functions from multiple isolated provider systems into a single consolidated notification mechanism. All invoice-related communications from different providers are aggregated and delivered through one unified notification channel to the patient, preventing information loss while consolidating the complexity of managing multiple separate notification systems into a single integrated approach.
Data Source
AI summary
A method performed by multi-tenant system for consolidated user services (MTSCUS) may include receiving invoice information for multiple patients sent from multiple providers, comprising separately created invoices for their multiple patients, identifying invoices received from the multiple providers that identify patient invoices for each of the multiple patients for healthcare providers both enrolled and not enrolled to receive payment, creating, with an intelligent notification system, an invoice notification plan tailored to each of the multiple patients, displaying invoices to each of the multiple patients, and receiving and directing payment from each of the multiple patients to accounts of the multiple healthcare providers for each of the invoices for each of the multiple patients, wherein healthcare providers enrolled to receive electronic payment are sent electronic payment and healthcare providers not enrolled to receive electronic payment are sent a check.