How Pickersgill Retirement Community Made Paying Easier for Senior Living Residents and Families

Pickersgill Retirement Community, a nonprofit retirement community in Towson, Maryland, has served residents in independent living, assisted living, and skilled nursing since 1802, making it one of the oldest retirement communities in the state. From the beginning, the community’s mission has been to provide care and resources to the elderly, whatever stage of life they’re in.

Pickersgill is a single, independent community, not part of a larger network with multiple locations or a centralized billing department. So one team handles billing and payroll for everyone who lives there. Nicole Knight, the community’s Director of Finance, has led that team during a period that brought a steady shift in how residents and their families want to receive statements and pay their bills.

It started small. A few years ago, about 15 to 20 residents and family members had asked to receive their statements by email instead of by mail. That list grew steadily, eventually tripling to around 60 people, all wanting a faster way to get their bill and pay it before it was late.

Meeting that request meant downloading each resident’s statement as an individual PDF, and emailing it out one at a time, every month. For a small team wearing many hats, the workload piled up fast.

“Downloading each statement as its own PDF and emailing it to a resident or family member, then doing that 60 times every month, was quite time-consuming,” Knight said.

Statement PDF Export, an add-on to Inovalon’s Patient Statement Management™, changed that math. Instead of opening and downloading each resident’s statement one at a time, Knight’s team can now export the entire batch in a single step, whether a statement is headed out by email or to the printer.

“With Statement PDF Export, we’re able to download the statements from Inovalon, send them to the copier, and have the copier fold them. That saves us an hour or more each month,” Knight said. Staff still stuff and seal envelopes themselves, but the most repetitive part of the job is no longer a one-by-one task.

The hours Knight’s team no longer spends downloading and folding statements haven’t gone unused. They are now reallocated to other tasks, like working the accounts receivable (AR) for some of the community’s insurance accounts, follow-up that directly affects how quickly Pickersgill collects what it’s owed.

Because Knight’s team also handles payroll for the entire community, alongside billing across independent living, assisted living, and skilled nursing, the office doesn’t have extra hands to throw at a backlog. Every hour no longer spent downloading and folding statements is an hour that can be used in other ways to help ensure a smoother revenue cycle.

Some residents had been asking for another way to pay besides writing a check, and family members wanted the same flexibility too, since their only options were mailing a check or driving over to drop one off.  Pickersgill answered by adding a QR code to its statements through Patient Statement Management, so residents and families can pay online, while Inovalon’s Patient Payment Management™ lets the team see who has paid. About three months later, roughly a third of payments are now made online, a share that has climbed steadily. “Right off the bat, being at 30% is a big thing for us,” Knight said.

“People are grateful to have the option,” Knight said, “so they don’t have to come in to write a check or drop it off.”

The shift has practical upside beyond convenience, too. “It improves the flow,” Knight said. “You don’t have to worry about the wrong date on a check, a missing signature, or the amount being written incorrectly. It just takes all of that out.” Once a payment is made, it flows into Pickersgill’s records and its PointClickCare system automatically, cutting out a manual step for staff.

The transition showed up almost immediately. Statements went out one afternoon, and by the next morning, five or six payments were already in, including one resident who paid on the very first of the month. Knight didn’t expect people to pay earlier than they used to, but for a team accustomed to checks trickling in all month long, it’s a welcome surprise.

Because not every family lives nearby, about 10% of payments come from those who are out of state or who travel for work. Family members previously limited to finding a mailbox or making special trips to the building can now pay anytime, any place.

“We have some family members who used to be a little delayed paying the bill each month. Now that online payments is an option they are paying more timely, which is an indication this was a positive change,” Knight said.

The positive impact shows up in smaller moments, too. Residents have stopped by just to say thanks for the option, and family members who’d asked for something like this before are telling Knight they’re glad it’s finally here.

Rolling out Statement PDF Export and online payments meant staying in close contact with Inovalon along the way, especially while fine-tuning the payment processing setup.

“Communication is key,” Knight said. “When we put in a ticket asking if something’s possible or could be improved, Inovalon listens. That tells me they’re paying attention to their customers.”

For Knight, that kind of responsiveness is exactly what she wants from a technology partner.

Asked what she’d tell other provider organizations considering Inovalon solutions like Statement PDF Export, Knight didn’t hesitate.

“It’s totally it worth and can’t get any easier,” she said. “You simply go in, open up your statement file, and hit download.”

That confidence carries over into how Knight talks about the relationship overall, which she sees as just the beginning. “Hopefully it will continue to be a partnership that we can keep expanding and growing,” she said.

Three months in, Knight is already looking to get more of the residents and families still receiving individual emails to opt into paperless statements instead. If more residents sign up on their own, it could eventually mean retiring the last manual, one-by-one email process.

Getting there just requires residents and families to log in and consent to receive statements electronically. For them, it means getting their bill as soon as it’s ready instead of waiting on the mail, so they can pay it and move on. For Knight’s team, it means one less account to handle manually every month.

“This is huge,” Knight said of the progress so far. For a finance team of a few people supporting an entire community, an hour saved here and a batch of downloads simplified there add up to more time for the residents and families they serve.