I recently came across a LinkedIn post from Cedar highlighting how the financial experience matters more than ever as patient financial responsibility increases. I couldn’t agree more.
Cedar noted that four in 10 patients have delayed medical treatments due to payment concerns and will switch providers after a bad billing experience.
“Providers’ relationship with their patients is more financial now than ever before. We believe that there is a real impetus not just to financial health, but to physical health, to ensure you are providing the best-in-class financial experience to allow patients to both afford their care and health with peace of mind.” – Dugan Winkie, Cedar Head of Commercial Strategy
LinkedIn Post, February 2025
This research isn’t an anomaly — I recall seeing a similar voice-of-the-customer metric two decades ago. More recently, the RevealHX National Healthcare Experience Benchmarking Study found that six in 10 consumers delayed care and experienced difficulties related to costs.
It’s alarming that, despite all our tech advancements that should make it easier for healthcare systems to deliver straightforward, easy-to-pay bills, consumers still struggle to understand costs.
The Same Pain Points Decade After Decade
In the early 2000s, I worked in Product Development for a health insurance company — a time before “customer experience” was even a term and UX existed. In my early 30s, I didn’t know a PPO, POS and HMO were even considered “products” and was confused by all the acronyms in healthcare. The industry speaks an entirely different language. Why?
If you Google “what are the most confusing healthcare insurance terms” today, you’ll find deductible, coinsurance, copay, and out-of-pocket maximum at the top of the list — the same points of confusion that stumped consumers 20 years ago.
I recall a day when executives tasked me with removing customer friction by ‘making the EOB understandable’, to ultimately empower choice and improve outcomes.
To tackle this charge, we sat down with customers to rewrite the script. We tried to re-imagine the language through the lens of grade school teachers, wondering how they would tackle the ABCs of healthcare.
It may have been ambitious to try to revamp the language so that anyone with a third-grade education could understand it, but achieving this on a grand scale could transform so many patients’ lives. Unfortunately, our efforts to push the envelope in the 2000s didn’t succeed. We are still living with the confusing vocabulary, but at least now we have AI to help interpret it.
However, the demand for price transparency and attention to the financial experience continues to grow. I’ve yet to meet a consumer without a recent story of a challenge they encountered in understanding their costs, bills, or pay options.
Breaking the Trend in Delayed Care Associated with Costs and Payments
After listening to the struggles of tens of thousands of consumers over the years, I know the financial experience needs attention.
Consider these stats from the RevealHX National Healthcare Experience Benchmarking Study, showing the percentage of consumers that find navigating financial tasks easy:
- Paying a bill – 67%
- Knowing when to expect a bill – 64%
- Understanding payment options – 64%
- Getting billing questions answered – 59%
- Estimating costs – 54%
As my team dug into the insights, it was clear that awareness of tools is the challenge — not the use of tools. Once someone uses a tool, nine in 10 accomplish what they set out to do, and a majority are satisfied.
Just imagine how consumer trust, and ultimately revenue, would improve if bills were timely and both easy to understand and pay (digitally).
If I had a magic wand, I’d wave it to create a new kind of bill that addresses anticipated questions and provides clear payment options. But since I haven’t acquired one (yet!), I suggest the following steps as a starting point.
A Recipe for Change:
- Build a financial experience strategy and improvement roadmap: Put the customer at the center of your strategy, innovate and prioritize with a clear tie to the ROI, such as dollarizing patient leakage and market share erosion if friction causes patients to switch providers.
- Manage the experience: Leverage sentiment and behavioral analytics to understand the differences in friction experienced across different populations. Modern Experience Management (XM) technologies, like Qualtrics, can be a game changer. I’ve seen healthcare organizations use these tools to pinpoint problems, achieve cost savings quickly and spur growth. A health system client recently saw a 4% increase in digital-first adoption and satisfaction within 12 months, as well a saving of $3M as a result of digital fixes they otherwise wouldn’t have found.
- Invest in user experience (UX): I rarely see healthcare organizations pay as much attention to UX as financial services, hospitality, or retail companies. It’s worth the investment to elevate UX and integrate it into your improvement roadmap. The good news is that you don’t have to recreate the wheel; the playbook exists. Well-designed experiences ensure your customers can find what they need and complete tasks without friction. I am always looking for ideas on tools so I asked my colleague Adde Morgan, an expert in human centered design, for advice. She recommends parties investigate several tools for ideation, proto-typing and workshops such as Session Lab, Pip-decks, io. Voiceflow and D-ID. Check out more from Adde this spring in Cortico-X.com perspectives.
- Develop your AI roadmap to improve price transparency: Our VP of Innovation, Rik Reppe, shared “If we can just get over our regulatory fear and our need to control, AI can help our patients and caregivers understand things faster, better, and with greater confidence. Of course, we have to comply with regulatory requirements. That’s just a constraint, not an impenetrable barrier.” So, assess if you are staying on top of customer needs by using AI to mine feedback and quantify unmet needs. You can also use it to automate cost estimates, create user-friendly access to pricing information, and personalize cost information for customers (even factoring in the end cost after insurance). Furthermore, AI agents can aid contact centers in quickly finding and resolving customer questions.
- Have and inspire empathy: We are all consumers, so step back from your role and look through that lens. Engage employees in finding solutions by looking through the same lens. Healthcare will improve in the next two decades if providers, payers, the government, and the community work together.
Robyn’s Crystal Ball for 2035
I still believe healthcare language can and should change, but I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime. Even so, I’m confident we can turn the corner in the next ten years so fewer consumers delay necessary care — if we work together.
At Cortico-X, we help business leaders develop their customer and patient experience strategy every day. Whether you’re trying to make sense of where to start, understand the return on the experience, or pilot changes before launching a large-scale program, we’ve been there — and we can help. If this framework resonates with you, let’s talk.
Robyn Gilson
is a Vice President at Cortico-X, leading our Healthcare practice. She leverages her vast CX and EX leadership expertise across industries to drive both cultural transformations and incremental growth for clients.
