As of the signing of Senate Bill 1264 on June 14th, Texas is now among a slew of states that have consumer protection laws in place for Surprise billing.

The bill will be effective as of September 2019 and will focus on getting rid of surprise billing for some specific health plans as well as the mandatory mediation requests and also by implementing limitations on surprise billing information being reported by reporting agencies.

Under the new bill, mediation will not require involvement from the patient at all but instead it will be between the health plan and the provider and it will be managed by an impartial mediator. All types of providers can request help with mediation from the state and the cost of that mediator will be then split between the respective parties. It is then the responsibility of the state to notify the affected parties that are so named in the mediation request. 

As per the legislation, mediation must be started within 180 days of the request being submitted. The new bill also requests health plans to pay any emergency care given by any out of network providers at an established rate that the organization considers reasonable. 

Here are some of the key strategies in order to explore your organization can execute to gain the upper hand in the new healthcare marketing landscape.
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1. Be online to gain attention.
Undoubtedly — attention has shifted to the internet. In fact, 88 percent of U.S. adults use the internet today, in contrast to merely 52 percent in the year of 2000, according to data from Pew Research Center. And this trend is not restricted to youngsters: People of USA age 65 and older have been identified as the demographic with the fastest internet usage adoption rate since the year of 2000.